Supporting the design of privacy-aware business processes via privacy process patterns

Abstract

Privacy is an increasingly important concern for modern software systems which handle personal and sensitive user information. Privacy by design has been established in order to highlight the path to be followed during a system's design phase ensuring the appropriate level of privacy for the information it handles. Nonetheless, transitioning between privacy concerns identified early during the system's design phase, and privacy implementing technologies to satisfy such concerns at the later development stages, remains a challenge. In order to overcome this issue, mainly caused by the lack of privacy-related expertise of software systems engineers, this work proposes a series of privacy process patterns. The proposed patterns encapsulate expert knowledge and provide predefined solutions for the satisfaction of different types of privacy concerns. The patterns presented in this work are used as a component of an existing privacy-aware system design methodology, through which they are applied to a real life system.