An Automatic Privacy Policy Agreement Checker for E-services

An effective way of managing privacy for an e-service user is to make use of user and service provider privacy policies. The user privacy policy expresses the user\´s privacy preferences for personal information that is to be shared with the e-service provider. The provider privacy policy expresses the privacy requirements of the providerpsilas service, in terms of what personal information the service requires and how the information will be used. The e-service may proceed only if the user privacy policy "agrees" with the provider privacy policy. However, checking for policy agreement needs to be relatively fast in an e-services environment. How can this checking be automated? This paper defines user and provider privacy policies based on legal considerations. It then proposes a privacy policy agreement checker that can automatically determine if the user privacy policy agrees with the corresponding provider privacy policy. An example application of the checker is included.