Techniques and infrastructure are provided for supporting global
customization. The invention enables persona profiles of user information
to be maintained, and such persona profiles to be accessed by merchants.
Via the persona abstraction, users control what information is grouped
into a persona profile, and can selectively enable a merchant to read one
of these profiles. The infrastructure of the invention employs a persona
server that assists users in managing their personae. The infrastructure
of the invention separates this from the profile databases at which
persona profile information is stored, to eliminate any single point at
which different persona profiles can be tied to the same user. Since
merchants also have privacy concerns, the infrastructure of the invention
provides a data protection model based on tainting, by which merchants
can limit how the information they contribute can be exposed.