Does a Privacy Risk Impose a Real Threat in Collaborative Environments?

Abstract

The designing and building of collaborative environments through inter-organizational information systems are faced by many challenges. One of these challenges is the privacy risk that might occur because of the lack of the protection while sharing sensitive data. In this paper, we present case study of building a collaborative environment among financial organizations who intend to improve their security capabilities by building collaborative intrusion detection system. However, the case study doesn't take into account the privacy problem and consequently, the damages that can be occurred because of the lack of the privacy protection. Our concentration is to show that the privacy risk should be considered as a real threat for the collaboration because, in some cases, a privacy breach might go beyond just being an annoying issue to cause more other serious damages and losses such as money or reputation for the collaborating organizations. In other words, we are going to provide the motivations for the need of the privacy protection for the collaborative environment which consequently ensures that the contributions from the organizations are useful and the expected results from the collaboration can be gained.