To Örebro University

The increasing use of the Internet for service delivery has paralleled an increase of e-service users' privacy concerns as technology offers ample opportunities for organizations to store, process, and exploit personal data. This may reduce individuals' perceived ability to control their personal information and increase their perceived privacy risk. A systematic understanding of individuals' privacy concerns is important as negative user perceptions are a challenge to service providers' reputation and may hamper service delivery processes as they influence users' trust and willingness to disclose personal information. This study develops and validates a model that examines the effect of organizational privacy assurances on individual privacy concerns, privacy control and risk perceptions, trust beliefs and non-self-disclosure behavior. Drawing on a survey to 547 users of different types of e-services – e-government, e-commerce and social networking – in Rwanda, and working within the framework of exploratory analysis, this study uses partial least square-structural equation modeling to validate the overall model and the proposed hypotheses. The findings show that perceptions of privacy risks and privacy control are antecedents of e-service users' privacy concerns, trust and non-self-disclosure behavior. They further show that the perceived effectiveness of privacy policy and perceived effectiveness of self-regulations influence both perceptions of privacy risks and control and their consequences; users' privacy concerns, trust and non-self-disclosure behavior. The hypotheses are supported differently across the three types of e-services, which means that privacy is specific to context and situation. The study shows that the effect of privacy assurances on trust is different in e-government services than in other services which suggest that trust in e-government may be more complex and different in nature than in other contexts. The findings serve to enhance a theoretical understanding of organizational privacy assurances and individual privacy concerns, trust and self-disclosure behavior. They also have implications for e-service providers and users as well as for regulatory bodies and e-services designers.

Privacy of information is a critical issue for e-government development as lack of it negatively influences users’ trust and adoption of e-government. To earn user trust government organizations need to provide reliable privacy assurance by implementing adequate information privacy protection (IPP) practices. African Least Developing Countries (LDCs) today develop e-government but focus is on quick technical development and the status of IPP issues is not clear. Little research has yet studied the status of IPP practices in e-government in African LDCs. To fill this gap, we assess the status of existing IPP practices in e-government in Rwanda, using international privacy principles as an assessment baseline. We adopt a case-study approach including three cases. Data were collected by interviews and a survey. The findings call into question the efficacy of existing IPP practices and their effect in ensuring e-government service users’ privacy protection in Rwanda. The study extends existing literature by providing insights related to privacy protection from an African LDC context. For practitioners in Rwanda and other LDCs, this study contributes to the protection of information privacy in e-government by providing recommendations to mitigate identified gaps.

Privacy of information is a critical issue for e‐government service development as lack of it negatively influences users' trust and adoption. To earn user trust, government organizations need to provide reliable privacy assurance by implementing adequate information privacy protection practices. African least developed countries (LDCs) today develop e‐government, but the status of privacy protection in these countries is not clear. This research aims to help in the achievement of the successful protection of information privacy in e-government in an LDC country, Rwanda. For this, empirical studies were conducted to increase understanding of issues re-lated to information privacy in e-government in Rwanda. A mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods was applied for data collection and analysis.

The results show that Rwandans’ concerns about information privacy in e-government context are high, that organizational information privacy protection practices can reduce users concerns, but also that existing privacy protection practices are not adequate to ensure users’ privacy. The studies also find that users are more concerned with e-government services than with other types of electronic services. Based on these findings, this thesis suggests a set of guidelines for government organizations in Rwanda in order to achieve effective information privacy protection practices.

The thesis contributes to the body of knowledge in the fields of e-government and information privacy by providing empirical studies from an African LDC context and developing and testing a new model explaining the links between organizational information privacy protection practices, privacy concerns and the related antecedents and consequences, hence enhancing the theoretical understanding of these relations. The thesis contributes to practice by providing a set of guidelines that can guide government organizations in Rwanda, and/ or other African LDCs in a similar situation in the process of developing information privacy protection practices.

E-government is a strong focus in many developing countries. While services can technically benefit from solutions developed elsewhere, organizational development and user trust and acceptance are always local. In Least Developed Countries (LDCs) such issues become more dramatic as services are transformed quickly from traditional manual procedures to digitized ones copying models from developed countries. One of the most critical trust issues is privacy protection; e-government services must be developed in balance with citizens’ privacy views.

To understand how to design trusted services in an LDC this study investigates information privacy concerns, perceptions of privacy practices, trust beliefs and behavior intentions towards using e-government services in Rwanda. The study was conducted by means of a survey (n = 540).

A majority of the respondents had a considerable level of trust, and a positive view of the effectiveness of service providers’ privacy practices. Most respondents expressed positive intentions towards using e-government services. Still, a majority of the respondents expressed considerable privacy concerns. Men were more concerned than women and reported a higher reluctance to use e-government service. As this study is one of the few studies of privacy, trust and adoption of e-government in LDC, it contributes to broadening the context in which such issues have been researched.

This paper introduce (ABDIDS), a simple pattern attack ontology that allows agent based intrusion detection system to detect network traffic anomalies at a higher level more than most current intrusion detection systems do. The cooperative agent architecture has been presented. It has been shown how some attributes in network communication can be used to detect attacks. Finally, the benefits of using the proposed values in attack pattern Ontology within intrusion detection system have been illustrated.

Intelligent agents operate in an environment that can be mostly not dynamic. This requires learning by trial and error in order to know better the environment and reach their goals. They also need cooperation among themselves. We use reinforcement learning and game theory techniques to discuss how intelligent agents learn and cooperate. As known, one of the properties of agents is that they are social. They must therefore be cooperative in the social environment where they are. This is possible by learning the environment facts by doing, sharing instantaneous information and learned knowledge. The cooperative agents will perform better than independent agents. What is the advantage of such cooperation? As an example, in this paper we shall especially show how cooperative trading agents can maximize their profits due to a good coordination by playing Nash equilibrium to ensure that each agent chooses the best strategy which gives a good payoff.