Nowadays privacy-aware approaches are crucial to improve citizens’ awareness, trust and acceptance of PAs’ online services, to design them taking privacy into account.
Such approaches require a change in the way privacy is managed, from a passive to a proactive manner, incorporating privacy analysis from the start (Privacy by Design). However, privacy management is not always adequately considered in PAs’ online services. Privacy statements, setting out the privacy rights of the citizens regarding the collection, use, storage, sharing and protection of personal information, are often difficult for citizens to fully understand, thus discouraging them from using PAs’ online services.
VisiOn aims to deliver a Visual Privacy Platform (VPP) that, on one hand, empowers citizens to specify and monitor desired levels of privacy and, on the other hand, equips PAs with the right tools to improve citizens’ transparency and trust in their actions. The former is achieved by providing citizens the means to create and monitor a personal Privacy Level Agreement (PLA) and by enabling them to visualize their privacy preferences, relevant threats and trust issues. The latter is achieved by enabling PAs to:
- analyse, visualise and develop a PLA, which can be shared with citizens through the platform;
- analyse potential threats and vulnerabilities to their privacy needs and identify countermeasures to minimize them, while at the same time informing citizens about these;
- analyse trust relationships with third party providers and establish whether these relationships endanger transparency and accountability from a citizen’s perspective.
The VisiOn consortium extended existing software and methodologies, which partners have developed in previous projects, in order to implement the VPP software components.
The VisiOn platform has been tested in two different realistic scenario types. Type I covers situations where citizens share their data with a public authority or a local government. Type II represents scenarios where healthcare institutions from two different countries must exchange patient data to provide some required service.
The result has been very satisfying and covered the requirements PAs identified. This accomplishment is indeed a big achievement of the project as the nature of these organisations is very different in terms of goals, necessities and use of VisiOn. Existing tools have been enhanced in order to allow companies to check their compliance with the GDPR and to provide support for implementing the necessary changes in their systems. This will have a big impact in organisations as, that way, they will be able not only to provide privacy for the citizens but also use VisiOn for making their organisations fulfil the GDPR, showing citizens their data is protected through policies at organisation, country or European level.
