Privacy Policies and their Negotiation in Distance Education

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 elearning 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.