Designing Privacy Aware Information Systems

Abstract

A major challenge in the field of software engineering is to make users trust the software that they use in their everyday activities for professional or recreational reasons. Trusting software depends on various elements, one of which is the protection of user privacy. Protecting privacy is about complying with user’s desires when it comes to handling personal information. Users’ privacy can also be defined as the right to determine when, how and to what extend information about them is communicated to others. Current research stresses the need for addressing privacy issues during the system design rather than during the system implementation phase. The aim of this chapter is to elevate the modern practices for ensuring privacy during the software systems’ design phase. Through the presentation of the modern methods, the basic privacy requirements that should be considered during system analysis are introduced. Additionally, a number of well known methods that have been introduced in the research area of requirements engineering which aim on eliciting and analyzing privacy requirements during system design are introduced and analyzed. Finally, a comparative analysis between these methods is presented.