Privacy Policies and Their Negotiation in Distance Education

Abstract

This chapter begins by introducing the reader to privacy policies, e-services, and privacy management. It then derives the contents of a privacy policy and explains “policy matching”. It next presents an approach for the negotiation of privacy policies for an e-learning service. Both negotiating under certainty and uncertainty are treated. The type of uncertainty discussed is uncertainty of what offers and counter-offers to make during the negotiation. The approach makes use of common interest and reputation to arrive at a list of candidates who have negotiated the same issues in the past, from whom the negotiator can learn the possible offers and counter-offers that could be made. Negotiation in this work is done through human-mediated computer-assisted interaction rather than through autonomous agents. The chapter concludes with a discussion of issues and future research in this area.