Goal-Mining to Examine Health Care Privacy Policies

Privacy has recently become a prominent issue in the context of electronic electronic commerce Web sites. Increasingly, privacy policies posted on such Web sites are receiving considerable attention from the government and consumers. We have used goal-mining, the extraction of pre-requirements goals from post-requirements text artifacts, as a technique for analyzing privacy policies. The identified goals are useful for analyzing implicit internal conflicts within privacy policies and conflicts with the corresponding web sites and their manner of operation. These goals can be used to reconstruct the implicit requirements met by the privacy policies. We present the results of our analysis of 23 Internet privacy policies for companies in three health care industries: pharmaceutical, health insurance and online drugstores.