The Case for Privacy Awareness Requirements

Abstract

Privacy awareness is a core determinant of the success or failure of privacy infrastructures: if systems and users are not aware of potential privacy concerns, they cannot effectively discover, use or judge the effectiveness of privacy management capabilities. Yet, privacy awareness is only implicitly described or implemented during the privacy engineering of software systems. In this paper, the author advocates a systematic approach to considering privacy awareness. He characterizes privacy awareness and illustrate its benefits to preserving privacy in a smart mobile environment. The author proposes privacy awareness requirements to anchor the consideration of privacy awareness needs of software systems. Based on these needs, an initial process framework for the identification of privacy awareness issues is proposed. He also argues that a systematic route to privacy awareness necessitates the investigation of an appropriate representation language, analysis mechanisms and understanding the socio-technical factors that impact the manner in which we regulate our privacy.