Strategic pseudonym change in agent-based e-commerce

In agent-based e-commerce applications, vendors can construct detailed profiles about customers' preferences. These profiles can then be used to perform practices such as price discrimination, poor judgment, etc. The use of pseudonyms and, specially, changing pseudonyms from time to time are known to minimize profiling. Although there are some agent frameworks and platforms that support pseudonym change, there are few proposals that suggest or directly change the pseudonym in an automatic fashion. Instead, users are usually provided with the mechanisms to change pseudonyms but without any mechanism that aids them to decide when to change their pseudonyms. We present in this paper an approach to pseudonym change based on human privacy attitudes.