Towards Transparency-Encouraging Partial Software Disclosure to Enable Trust in Data Usage

Abstract

Whenever software components process personal or private data, appropriate data protection mechanisms are mandatory. An essential factor in achieving trust and transparency is not to give preference to a single party but to make it possible to audit the data usage in an unbiased way. The scenario in mind for this contribution contains (i) users bringing in sensitive data they want to be safe, (ii) developers building software-based services whose Intellectual Properties (IPs) they desire to protect, and (iii) platform providers wanting to be trusted and to be able to rely on the developers integrity. The authors see these interests as an insufficiently solved field of tension that can be relaxed by a suitable level of transparently represented software components to give insights without exposing every detail.