Confidence-Compensating Privacy Protection

The particularly acute problem in privacy protection is to provide such a protection beyond the original disclosure of personal information. There, the need for privacy is strongly related to the confidence in the goodwill of the party that receives such information. In the absence of such a confidence, the disclosure should be limited. However, putting excessive constrains on the disclosure itself can have a damaging effect on the relationship. In order to minimize the potential damage, limitations to the extent of a disclosure should be deployed sparsely, with its strength and direction adjusted to the extent of actual lack of confidence. This paper proposes the flexible strategy for privacy protection that takes into account the lack of perceived confidence. The strategy determines three orthogonal dimensions that can be used to classify various privacy-enhancing tools and links those dimensions with individualpsilas structure of beliefs regarding confidence. This allows to provide the simple decision-making tools that allows to determine the best minimum privacy protection for a given case.