Translating Privacy Practices into Privacy Promises—How to Promise What You Can Keep

• Authors: Günter Karjoth;Matthias Schunter;Els Van Herreweghen
• Venue: POLICY '03 Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks
• Year: 2003

Enterprises advertise privacy promises using the W3CPlatform for Privacy Preferences (P3P). These privacypromises define what recipients can obtain what collecteddata for what purpose. Internally, enterprises can use fine-grainedprivacy practices such as defined by the Platformfor Enterprise Privacy Practices (E-P3P) to enforce privacy.These internal privacy policies should guarantee andenforce the promises made to the customers. Since privacypractices reflect business internals, they can changefrequently. As a consequence, it can be challenging to keepthe promises up-to-date with the actual practices. To enableup-to-date privacy promises, we describe a methodology forenterprises to promise what they can keep. This is doneby automatically transforming E-P3P privacy practices intocorresponding P3P privacy promises that reflect the actualenterprise-internal behavior. These P3P promises can thenbe published on a regular basis. Whenever the internalpolicies change, the P3P promises can easily be updatedas well.