Privacy in distributed reputation management

In online communities, the users typically do not meet personally, and, thus, they have to estimate the trustworthiness of the other parties using other means. To assist these estimations, various reputation systems have been developed. But collecting the required reputation information, which, essentially, is information about the user’s past, also creates privacy concerns. In this paper, we examine how the distribution of reputation management using P2P networks deals with the privacy concerns of processing reputation information. We analyze the distributed reputation management from three angles: how the requirements of fair use practices should be reflected on the system design, what classes of information is leaked and, finally, how to manage the risks related to the social and technical issues.