Preserving Privacy Based on Semantic Policy Tools

Abstract—Private data of individuals is constantly being collected, analyzed, and stored by different kinds of organizations: shopping sites to provide better service and recommendations, hospitals for improved healthcare, and government agencies to enable national defense and law enforcement. Sharing data between these organizations makes it possible to discover important knowledge and draw useful conclusions but raises concerns about information privacy and trust. Until recently the focus was on restricting access to data on a “need to know” basis, but since the 9/11 Commission there has been a paradigm shift to “need to share”. Our work explores the use of semantic privacy policies, justifications for data requests, and automated auditing to encourage sharing of sensitive data between organizations. We describe an architecture based on our policy tools that evaluates incoming queries against semantic policies and domain knowledge and provides a justification for each que...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: IEEESP
• Authors: Lalana Kagal, Joe Pato
• Keywords: IEEESP 2010, Policies, Privacy Policies, Semantics