DELEGATION OF USER'S CONSENT IN FEDERATION OF SERVICES AND IDENTITY PROVIDERS

The present invention is aimed to provide a mechanism whereby any person can have user's attributes in a web service provider for sharing with a web service consumer, even if such person is not enabled to provide user's consent to share such user's attributes, and provided that other persons at a hierarchically higher position are enabled to provide such user's consent instead of the owner of the user's attributes, whilst respecting high requirements on privacy for both. Therefore, the present invention provides for a number of cooperating entities and a new method, the cooperating entities being configurable in such manner that delegation modules comprising different relationships of user's consent may be distributed among some of the cooperating entities, and transmitted between the number of cooperating entities, depending on the required level of privacy set on a per network basis and on a per user basis.