FCS News

Originally shared in the Fall 2014 CS Magazine.

Research in Dal's E-Privacy Lab are working on ways to uplift privacy

“Without security and privacy, consumers will not trust…We are counting on the digital economy for jobs and growth in EU,” said Paul Timmers, Director of the Sustainable and Secure Society Directorate DG CONNECT, European Commission, in Athens 2014.

Dr. Peter Bodorik (Dalhousie Faculty of Computer Science), Dr. Dawn Jutla (Saint Mary’s Sobey School of Business and adjunct professor to Dalhousie’s Faculty of Computer Science) and graduate research students in the e-Privacy Lab are working on research that has an international impact on the emerging field of privacy engineering. Their work is helping inform the nascent privacy engineering field from technical, organizational, user, and governance perspectives. Privacy not only enables online commerce, but it protects the human right to be left alone and to control the dissemination of information. Privacy engineering is important in its promise to help shape increasingly online civil societies as well as support economic renewal from digital economies.

In the e-Privacy Lab, research and development is conducted on the architectures, methods, methodologies, and management building blocks for privacy and e-commerce. The team is translating their know-how into tools for privacy-enabling start-ups and larger businesses.

Privacy Engineering and Big Data

The digitization of vast quantities of information leads to the collaboration of many stakeholders to develop shared standards-based interoperable platforms. This convergence supports the efficient analysis and flow of information to accelerate new discoveries. But significant discipline-based communication gaps exist among policymakers, businesses and software engineers. Where policymakers leverage rich textuallanguage, software engineers communicate cryptically with code snippets or pseudocode and visually with things like flow charts and sketches. Their partially standardized visual diagrams, screenshots and associated metadata are literally worth thousands of words.

These provide rich sources of documentation that can be put to many good uses including closing communication gaps among multidisciplinary stakeholders and facilitating systematic audits. New standards-based approaches are required to help make the output of big data algorithms more secure and protected. The e-Privacy Lab specifically examines how they can aid software engineers to embed privacy using new tools and services to visualize complex stakeholder interaction with software systems.

Visualizing and Documenting

The primary purpose of documentation is to communicate. Organizations of all sizes employ good documentation for rapid onboarding of employees on a project. With high turnover rates, ensuring quality documentation is an essential operational item requiring strict management. Primary software engineering methodologies (for example: traditional and agile) recommend frequent quality documentation as a best practice. Agile modeling methodologies cite documenting as late as possible and storing one version of documentation. In practice, software engineers have started using tools such as JIRA to tag, document and store software requirements as security and/or privacy related in one place. Software engineering documentation may be used to demonstrate proof of compliance at an auditing level.

Moving Privacy R&D into International Standards

The vision behind years of R&D in privacy engineering and e-commerce work at Dalhousie University and Saint Mary’s University translates to thought leadership that is currently informing a major emerging international privacy standard from the OASIS Privacy by Design Documentation for Software Engineers Technical Commitee (OASIS TC).

Dr. Jutla, who is also Director of the Master of Technology Entrepreneurship and Innovation (MTEI) program at Saint Mary’s University, co-chairs the OASIS TC with Dr. Ann Cavoukian, Executive Director of the Privacy and Big Data Institute at Ryerson University, and former Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario.

“We require more successful university and private sector partnerships like these for a meaningful international impact of privacy R&D on commerce, healthcare, and governments,” says Dr. Bodorik, also a former director of the Master of Electronic Commerce program and Associate Dean at Dalhousie.