Closing the Gap Between Privacy Policies and Privacy Preferences with Privacy Interfaces.

Privacy is an important topic regarding the modern and interconnected world. However, there is a tendency to ignore own intentions regarding customization of privacy policies in favor of saving time and using a specific service. To tackle this problem, a wide range of formal languages, expressing user preferences or privacy policies, have been developed by the scientific community. However, due to the variety of these languages, interoperability is only given between approaches designed to complement each other. As a result, as long as there is no standard in this domain, there will not be a broadly accepted solution. The aim of this paper is to provide a mechanism to counteract the lack of compatibility. To contribute to that very goal, this paper introduces the Privacy Interfaces mechanism which allows a Unified Privacy Policy Negotiation . It enables compatibility between otherwise incompatible preference languages and privacy languages, by creating standardized Language Mappings , which serve as a baseline for negotiation.