A comprehensive study to the protection of digital library readers' privacy under an untrusted network environment
ISSN: 0737-8831
Article publication date: 29 September 2021
Issue publication date: 8 December 2022
Abstract
Purpose
First, the authors analyze the key problems faced by the protection of digital library readers' data privacy and behavior privacy. Second, the authors introduce the characteristics of all kinds of existing approaches to privacy protection and their application limitations in the protection of readers' data privacy and behavior privacy. Lastly, the authors compare the advantages and disadvantages of each kind of existing approaches in terms of security, efficiency, accuracy and practicality and analyze the challenges faced by the protection of digital library reader privacy.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, the authors review a number of research achievements relevant to privacy protection and analyze and evaluate the application limitations of them in the reader privacy protection of a digital library, consequently, establishing the constraints that an ideal approach to library reader privacy protection should meet, so as to provide references for the follow-up research of the problem.
Findings
As a result, the authors conclude that an ideal approach to reader privacy protection should be able to comprehensively improve the security of all kinds of readers' privacy information on the untrusted server-side as a whole, under the premise of not changing the architecture, efficiency, accuracy and practicality of a digital library system.
Originality/value
Along with the rapid development of new network technologies, such as cloud computing, the server-side of a digital library is becoming more and more untrustworthy, thereby, posing a serious threat to the privacy of library readers. In fact, the problem of reader privacy has become one of the important obstacles to the further development and application of digital libraries.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work is a research achievement from the Zhijiang Youth Project of Zhejiang Social Science Planning of China, and this work was supported in part by the Major Humanities and Social Sciences Research Project of Zhejiang Provincial Universities of China (No. 2021GH017), the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (No. LY19F020018) and Humanities and Social Sciences Project of the Ministry of Education of China (Nos. 21YJA870011 and 21YJCZH096).
Citation
Wu, Z., Shen, S., Li, H., Zhou, H. and Zou, D. (2022), "A comprehensive study to the protection of digital library readers' privacy under an untrusted network environment", Library Hi Tech, Vol. 40 No. 6, pp. 1930-1953. https://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-07-2021-0239
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited