The present invention relates to the field of the sharing of services between several users, especially and not exclusively, in a context of services accessible through a communication network, some of these services possibly, for example, relying on the principles of the community web, or else pertaining to a context of interpersonal communications.
Various embodiments of the invention are aimed at introducing management of right of access of a user A to personal services (for example telephonic, presence) configured by a user B, linked with a user interface of web type.
Indeed, increasingly, telecommunication services are being designed with a view to community sharing and use of personalized information during interpersonal communications, or more generally still, with a view to mediation between a user and third parties.
By way of illustrative example, a photo service is no longer aimed solely at storing a user's photos, but also at allowing him to share them with others.
Likewise, a location service is no longer aimed solely at indicating to a user his location, but also at providing it to third parties.
The same holds for presence management services.
Older services such as telephony also enter into this framework: a telephone service allows third parties to contact a user.
In all these services, there is a requirement for control by the user who will render accessible to other users services that he has previously configured and/or personalized.
In the field of STN telephony, access to the telephone service is in principle public: anybody can access the telephone numbers referenced in a directory.
In the field of mobile telephony, there is a restriction of access by the dissemination of the mobile telephone number: the user can choose, either to publish his number in a directory so as to render it accessible to anybody, or to transmit it solely to the people that he authorizes to contact him by this means, via his mobile telephone.
As regards presence or location services, use is made of nominative authorization of the people who can access the presence or the location of a user of the service, these people being characterized by one of their personal identifiers with the presence/location service.
Other services, for example of the “social networking” type, combine a directory where it is possible to seek friends (for example according to one of their identifiers (often the name or forename), or via the membership of a network, or via centers of interest) and thus initially to access their public profile, and then request nominative authorization to access the private profile.
However, in all the aforementioned services, it is the service itself which manages the access authorizations.
Moreover, as regards communication services (telephony, presence, etc.), the existing solutions for managing access to services are based on a centralizing knowledge of the parties involved in the services.
A user expresses rights of access to his data and configures his services on the basis of the knowledge that he has or that he can obtain of his correspondents, for example on the basis of a contactability identifier, for example, a telephone number.
The history of the interactions between users is also involved in this knowledge base. An agreement may be established between users on their inclusion in lists of friends. Some interactions may have occurred in the past.
These data are also currently used to determine access rights.
In the services for sharing personal data (for example photos), known prior art solutions use the sending of invitations containing an access link, but these solutions are specific to each service. Allotting rights of access to N services therefore requires the sending of N invitations via N different interfaces, and which will be received and managed in N different ways by the receiver.
The earlier techniques exhibit principally all the following limitations:                the user must have an understanding of the various systems that he will be able to use to set up his access rights;        he must also know the contactability identifiers of his correspondents in order to adapt his systems as a function of these data;        it is not possible to set up access controls if the contactability identifiers of his correspondents are not known a priori.        
Various embodiments of the invention provide a novel solution which does not exhibit all these drawbacks of the prior art, in the form of a method of access by at least one second user, to at least one service offered by a first user.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds