A Galois lattice approach to a context-aware privacy negotiation service

Online privacy has consistently been a major concern for customers that has grown commensurately with the growth of e-services. Service providers have responded by making their privacy policies clearer for customers; however, most providers use legacy systems that are unable to actually change and adapt to user’s concerns, which can lead to fewer customers using the system. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to propose a context-aware privacy policy negotiation service. To do so, we adopt a Galois lattice theory to generate policy concepts embedded in e-services. Based on the Galois lattice, we develop a process for generating privacy policy rules. To show the feasibility of the ideas proposed in this paper, we perform a simulation test with two different online auction sites as an illustrative case in terms of two metrics: the number of rules generated and success throughput. Desirable features in applying the Galois lattice approach to context-aware privacy policy negotiation service are discussed.