Argumentation-based Dialogues for Privacy Policy Reasoning

The scale, heterogeneity, pervasiveness and dynamism of Internet of Things (IoT) environments introduce some privacy issues for the users and those who are affected by the environments. This is because IoT systems rely heavily on collecting data; and the major areas of concerns include the potential impact of such information flow on the privacy of users. Recently, contextual integrity theory was developed to define context-relative norms for governing information flow. Context-relative norms are characterized by a situation’s general institutional and social circumstances; the involved actors and their roles; the information being collected, processed, or shared; and the expected transmission principles. One key issue is that individual users may have varying preferences regarding data collection, retention time and who the collected data can be shared with. In this paper, we provide a motivation for a dialogue between agents (human or artificial) about privacy requirements. Therefore, we introduce an argumentation-based dialogue in which participants interact by exchanging arguments about privacy requirements. Our claim is that such dialogues could help agents in understanding the users’ needs in this domain.