A decision support system for design for privacy

Abstract

Privacy is receiving increased attention from both consumers, who are concerned about how they are being tracked and profiled, and regulators, who are introducing stronger penalties and encouragements for organizations to comply with legislation and to carry out Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs). These concerns are strengthened as usage of internet services, cloud computing and social networking spread. Therefore companies have to take privacy requirements into account just as they previously had to do this for security. While security mechanisms are relatively mature, system and product developers are not often provided with concrete suggestions from a privacy angle. This can be a problem because developers do not usually possess privacy expertise. In this paper we argue that it would be useful to move beyond current best practice - where a set of searchable privacy guidelines may be provided to developers - to automated support to software developers in early phases of software development. Specifically, our proposal is a decision support system for design for privacy focused on privacy by policy, to be integrated into the development environment. We have implemented a proof of concept and are extending this work to incorporate state-of-the art consent mechanisms derived from the EnCoRe (Ensuring Consent and Revocation) project [1]. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.