Comparing and Matching Privacy Policies Using Community Consensus

The growth of the Internet is increasing the deployment of e-services in such areas as e-commerce, e-learning, and e-health. In parallel, service providers and consumers are realizing the need for privacy. Managing privacy using privacy policies is a promising approach. In this approach, an eservice consumer and an e-service provider each have separate privacy policies. Before an eservice is engaged, the consumer's policy must “match” the provider's policy. However, how is this matching defined? We propose a method for comparing consumer and provider privacy policies by comparing the privacy levels of privacy preferences in the policies. A “match” between consumer and provider privacy policies is then defined using this method. Since the notion of privacy is subjective and can vary from individual to individual, the privacy levels of individual preferences are obtained through community consensus.