The Privacy Guardian Agent: Towards Trustworthy AI Privacy Agents

TL;DR

The paper proposes a Privacy Guardian Agent that automates routine privacy consent decisions using user profiles and context, with transparency and escalation features to maintain trust and user control.

Contribution

It introduces a middle-ground AI privacy agent that automates consent, ensures transparency, and involves users only when necessary, addressing limitations of current paradigms.

Findings

The agent automates routine consent decisions effectively.

It provides transparent reasoning for autonomous decisions.

It escalates uncertain cases to users to preserve trust.

Abstract

The current "notice and consent" paradigm is broken: consent dialogues are often manipulative, and users cannot realistically read or understand every privacy policy. While recent LLM-based tools empower users seeking active control, many with limited time or motivation prefer full automation. However, fully autonomous solutions risk hallucinations and opaque decisions, undermining trust. I propose a middle ground - a Privacy Guardian Agent that automates routine consent choices using user profiles and contextual awareness while recognizing uncertainty. It escalates unclear or high-risk cases to the user, maintaining a human-in-the-loop only when necessary. To ensure agency and transparency, the agent's reasoning on its autonomous decisions is reviewable, allowing for user recourse. For problematic cases, even with minimal consent, it alerts the user and suggests switching to an alternative site. This approach aims to reduce consent fatigue while preserving trust and meaningful user autonomy.