Practical Privacy Assessments

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Author(s): Thejs Willem Jansen (Technical University of Denmark, Denmark)
Copyright: 2009
Pages: 28
Source title: Online Consumer Protection: Theories of Human Relativism
Source Author(s)/Editor(s): Kuanchin Chen (Western Michigan University, USA)and Adam Fadlalla (Cleveland State University, USA)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-012-7.ch004

Keywords: Business & Management / Business Science Reference / Consumer Management / E-Commerce

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Abstract

Governments and large companies are increasingly relying on information technology to provide enhanced services to the citizens and customers and reduce their operational costs. This means that an increasing amount of information about ordinary citizens is collected in a growing number of databases. As the amount of collected information grows and the ability to correlate information from many different databases increases, the risk that some or all of this information is disclosed to unauthorised third parties grows as well. Although most people appear unaware or unconcerned about this risk, both governments and large companies have started to worry about the dangers of privacy violations on a major scale. In this chapter, we present a new method of assessing the privacy protection offered by a specific IT system. The operational privacy assessment model, presented here, is based on an evaluation of all the organisational, operational and technical factors that are relevant to the protection of personal data stored and managed in an IT system. The different factors are measured on a simple scale and the results presented in a simple graphical form, which makes it easy to compare two systems to each other or to identify the factors that benefit most from improved privacy enhancing technologies.A standardised assessment of the privacy protection offered by a particular IT system; serve to help system owners understand the privacy risks in their IT system as well as help individuals, whose data is being processed, to understand their personal privacy situation. This will facilitate the development and procurement of IT systems with acceptable privacy levels, but the simple standard assessment result may also provide the basis for a certification scheme, which may help raise the confidence in the IT system’s ability to protect the privacy of the data stored and processed in the system.

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