Management of Users´ Privacy Preferences in Context

There has been intensive research on user-controlled privacy from the perspective of agent automation of privacy related user tasks. The W3C´s platform for privacy preferences (P3P) specifies standards that can be used by P3P agents to automatically retrieve a Web-site´s privacy policy on how the users´ data is collected, stored, and managed, and then to determine whether they are compatible with the user´s privacy preferences. Current approaches to managing user´s privacy do not capture context, are not user-friendly, and do cater well to the dynamic nature of privacy preferences very well. Clearly, the user´s privacy preferences depend on the context of the user´s online activity and the user´s preferences evolve with user´s experience and changing levels of trust in various organizations and domains. We propose a model for user´s privacy preferences that incorporates the context for user activity and we apply it using a case-based reasoning (CBR) approach that relates the current activity to previous activities stored in the case-base and thus forms an intuitive and understandable process. We describe the context model for privacy preferences, how CBR is used to create a new contextual case from the Web-site´s privacy policy and the user´s current activity, and how the CBR retrieves matching cases to be applied to the retrieved privacy policy.