VisiOn - Visual Privacy Management in User Centric Open Environments

Introduction

Public Administration (PA) authorities are working towards upgrading the level of their online services through new governance models such as the Open Government. This pushes for greater transparency, accountability and innovation aiming at increasing citizen levels of confidence and trust in PA online services. In this context, user data privacy is an important issue. VisiOn will deliver a high Technology Readiness Level (TRL) Visual Privacy Management Platform (VPP), which empowers any citizen to achieve desired levels of privacy by creating and monitoring a personal Privacy Level Agreement. The platform will provide clear visualisation of privacy preferences, relevant threats and trust issues along with an insight into the economic value of user data. The platform will equip PAs with the right tools to improve the transparency and accountability of their operations, by supporting visual analysis of:

• privacy issues at different levels (e.g. design, run-time) and perspectives (i.e. citizen, PA)
• regulation compliance and
• business/operational processes.

Who is the project designed for?

The platform will be provided to local and central Public Administrations and will allow citizens of the Union to directly manage and monitor their privacy through a personal agreement with the PA.
The platform will allow the user to clearly and intuitively express his privacy preferences and settings, to get to know of potential threats and other trust-related aspects, and finally to be aware of the monetary value of his personal data. From the organizations’ point of view, the platform will provide an overview of citizens’ expectations and of the privacy levels to comply with.
Thanks to the VisiOn platform, PAs will have tools and indicators to improve the transparency of their operations and to improve their accountability to the citizen.

How will your project benefit the end-user?

From a citizen’s perspective, the VPP will provide the following services:

• Support the elicitation and analysis of the citizen’s data privacy requirements.
• Demonstrate whether the citizen’s data privacy requirements are consistent (i.e. the citizen does not have conflicting privacy requirements).
• Determine the Privacy Level Agreement (PLA) for the citizen given their data privacy requirements.
• Provide useful insights on the economic value of their digital data and social footprint.
• Undertake privacy threat and trust analysis to make the citizen aware of the privacy risks and the level of trustworthiness that can be placed on PAs that require private data and therefore assisting decisions regarding data sharing. The analysis will consider the interplay between the trust level and the required privacy level, providing suggestions to the user.
• Notify the citizen whether the PA complies with relevant European laws and regulations.
• Monitoring the citizen data privacy level provided by the PA and then guarantees enforcement of their PLA.
• Enable the citizen to check whether their PLA is conflicting with SLAs defined by PA departments for services they provide.
• Allow the citizen to visualise all of the above functionalities therefore supporting privacy-related decisions.

From a Public Administration’s (PA’s) perspective, the VPP will provide the following services:

• Enable assessment of the PA’s privacy requirements with respect to the aggregated user data.
• Determine the Privacy Level Agreement (PLA) of the PA.
• Undertake privacy threat and trust analysis to make the PA aware of the privacy risks and the level of trustworthiness they should place on organisations (third parties the PA interacts with) with whom they might share information and to the different groups of PA employees.
• Inform the PA whether relevant European laws and regulations are satisfied by other PAs they share the user data with.
• Monitor the data privacy level provided by other PAs that the PA under consideration exchanged data with and guarantee enforcement of its PLA.
• Allow the PA to visualise all of the above functionalities.