Anonymous Shopping in the Internet by Separation of Data

Whenever clients shop in the Internet, they provide identifying data of themselves to parties like the webshop, shipper and payment system. These identifying data merged with their shopping history might be misused for targeted advertisement up to possible manipulations of the clients. The data also contains credit card or bank account numbers, which may be used for unauthorized money transactions by the involved parties or by criminals hacking the parties' computing infrastructure. In order to minimize these risks, we propose an approach for anonymous shopping by separation of data. We argue for the feasibility of our approach by discussing important operations like simple reclamation cases and criminal investigations.