Safeguard Privacy for Minimal Data Collection with Trustworthy Autonomous Agents

[purplecat]

For those of you wondering what paper I was presenting at AAMAS it was Safeguard Privacy for Minimal Data Collection with Trustworthy Autonomous Agents. Most of the work was done by Mengwei Xu who was working for me at the time.

We took an idea that a number of organisations and individuals, including Tim Berners-Lee, have been pushing for some time - that instead of giving all our personal data to web services in return for access, we should have a service that contains our personal data and gives access to it to web services. On top of this you could then implement policies - e.g., never give out my marital status.

As I say, the idea isn't new, but we looked at how such a personal data service/negotiator could by implemented in a way that would let you verify that it was enforcing the policies you wanted, and how you might verify them. There is quite a bit of technical material in the paper, but I don't think you need to get to grips with all the technical details in order to follow the argument, should you be so interested.

Comments

[a_cubed]

AH, the Vendor Relationship Management idea. I did some work with a Japanese telco related to this, on consumer acceptability/desirability.

[fred_mouse]

Thank you for the link; have downloaded it for 'later'.