Exploring personalized life cycle policies

Ambient Intelligence imposes many challenges in protecting people's privacy. Storing privacy-sensitive data permanently will inevitably result in privacy violations. Limited retention techniques might prove useful in order to limit the risks of unwanted and irreversible disclosure of privacy-sensitive data. To overcome the rigidness of simple limited retention policies, Life-Cycle policies more precisely describe when and how data could be first degraded and finally be destroyed. This allows users themselves to determine an adequate compromise between privacy and data retention. However, implementing and enforcing these policies is a difficult problem. Traditional databases are not designed or optimized for deleting data. In this report, we recall the formerly introduced life cycle policy model and the already developed techniques for handling a single collective policy for all data in a relational database management system. We identify the problems raised by loosening this single policy constraint and propose preliminary techniques for concurrently handling multiple policies in one data store. The main technical consequence for the storage structure is, that when allowing multiple policies, the degradation order of tuples will not always be equal to the insert order anymore. Apart from the technical aspects, we show that personalizing the policies introduces some inference breaches which have to be further investigated. To make such an investigation possible, we introduce a metric for privacy, which enables the possibility to compare the provided amount of privacy with the amount of privacy required by the policy

Double Secret Protection: Bridging Federal and State Law To Protect Privacy Rights for Telemental and Mobile Health Users

Mental health care in the United States is plagued by stigma, cost, and access issues that prevent many people from seeking and continuing treatment for mental health conditions. Emergent technology, however, may offer a solution. Through telemental health, patients can connect with providers remotely—avoiding stigmatizing situations that can arise from traditional healthcare delivery, receiving more affordable care, and reaching providers across geographic boundaries. And with mobile health technology, people can use smart phone applications both to self-monitor their mental health and to communicate with their doctors. But people do not want to take advantage of telemental and mobile health unless their privacy is protected. After evaluating the applicability of current health information privacy law to these new forms of treatment, this Note proposes changes to the federal regime to protect privacy rights for telemental and mobile health users

Double Secret Protection: Bridging Federal and State Law To Protect Privacy Rights for Telemental and Mobile Health Users

Mental health care in the United States is plagued by stigma, cost, and access issues that prevent many people from seeking and continuing treatment for mental health conditions. Emergent technology, however, may offer a solution. Through telemental health, patients can connect with providers remotely—avoiding stigmatizing situations that can arise from traditional healthcare delivery, receiving more affordable care, and reaching providers across geographic boundaries. And with mobile health technology, people can use smart phone applications both to self-monitor their mental health and to communicate with their doctors. But people do not want to take advantage of telemental and mobile health unless their privacy is protected. After evaluating the applicability of current health information privacy law to these new forms of treatment, this Note proposes changes to the federal regime to protect privacy rights for telemental and mobile health users

Privacy CURE: Consent Comprehension Made Easy

Although the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) defines several potential legal bases for personal data processing, in many cases data controllers, even when they are located outside the European Union (EU), will need to obtain consent from EU citizens for the processing of their personal data. Unfortunately, existing approaches for obtaining consent, such as pages of text followed by an agreement/disagreement mechanism, are neither specific nor informed. In order to address this challenge, we introduce our Consent reqUest useR intErface (CURE) prototype, which is based on the GDPR requirements and the interpretation of those requirements by the Article 29 Working Party (i.e., the predecessor of the European Data Protection Board). The CURE prototype provides transparency regarding personal data processing, more control via a customization, and, based on the results of our usability evaluation, improves user comprehension with respect to what data subjects actually consent to. Although the CURE prototype is based on the GDPR requirements, it could potentially be used in other jurisdictions also

How Registries Can Help Performance Measurement Improve Care

Suggests ways to better utilize databases of clinical information to evaluate care processes and outcomes and improve measurements of healthcare quality and costs, comparative clinical effectiveness research, and medical product safety surveillance

E-conomies of Trust

The Internet is like an engine driving commerce into a future rich with opportunity and challenge. Despite the potential, many organisations are reluctant to participate. Their executives feel they lack sufficient control in this new environment. Some want to take a more measured approach, with safeguards to protect them against hazards.

Online Personal Data Processing and EU Data Protection Reform. CEPS Task Force Report, April 2013

This report sheds light on the fundamental questions and underlying tensions between current policy objectives, compliance strategies and global trends in online personal data processing, assessing the existing and future framework in terms of effective regulation and public policy. Based on the discussions among the members of the CEPS Digital Forum and independent research carried out by the rapporteurs, policy conclusions are derived with the aim of making EU data protection policy more fit for purpose in today’s online technological context. This report constructively engages with the EU data protection framework, but does not provide a textual analysis of the EU data protection reform proposal as such