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Helping Software Architects Familiarize with the General Data Protection Regulation
Abstract
Abstract—The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
impacts any information systems that process personal data
in or from the European Union. Yet its enforcement is still
recent. Organizations under its effect are slow to adopt its
principles. One particular difficulty is the low familiarity with
the regulation among software architects and designers. The
difficulty to interpret the content of the legal regulation at
a technical level adds to that. This results in problems in
understanding the impact and consequences that the regulation
may have in detail for a particular system or project context.
In this paper we present some early work and emerging
results related to supporting software architects in this situation.
Specifically, we target those who need to understand how the
GDPR might impact their design decisions. In the spirit of
architectural tactics and patterns, we systematically identified
and categorized 155 forces in the regulation. These results form
the conceptual base for a first prototypical tool. It enables
software architects to identify the relevant forces by guiding
them through an online questionnaire. This leads them to relevant
fragments of the GDPR and potentially relevant privacy patterns.
We argue that this approach may help software professionals,
in particular architects, familiarize with the GDPR and outline
potential paths for evaluation.
Index Terms—software architecture; data privacy; decision
support systems; design decisions
... Developed project to identify the architectural smell detection for refactoring [37]. The concept of General Data Protection (GPDR) has articulated in [10] and data-driven in [39]. REST, RESTFUL API, and distribution microservices architecture has covered in [18] and [25], respectively. ...
... First examples of semi-automation or decision-support tools for this sub-step have already been presented. For example, Colesky et al. [Co19] present a tool to provide information on which recitals and articles of the GDPR are to be considered based on a questionnaire. Work like this can constitute the basis for further automation. ...
The GDPR enshrines the privacy by design paradigm in law, making sound privacy engineering methods more important than ever. Integrating automation and extensive tool support into the privacy engineering process has the potential to support organizations in streamlining the implementation of privacy and data protection by design and reducing its cost. Based on a privacy engineering reference process, this paper systematically investigates automation potential in privacy engineering. In particular, it discusses potentials and implications of automation in privacy engineering and illustrates directions for future research.
Privacy by design (PbD) is a policy measure that guides software developers to apply inherent solutions to achieve better privacy protection. For PbD to be a viable option, it is important to understand developers’ perceptions, interpretation and practices as to informational privacy (or data protection). To this end, we conducted in-depth interviews with 27 developers from different domains, who practice software design. Grounded analysis of the data revealed an interplay between several different forces affecting the way in which developers handle privacy concerns. Borrowing the schema of Social Cognitive Theory (SCT), we classified and analyzed the cognitive, organizational and behavioral factors that play a role in developers’ privacy decision making. Our findings indicate that developers use the vocabulary of data security to approach privacy challenges, and that this vocabulary limits their perceptions of privacy mainly to third-party threats coming from outside of the organization; that organizational privacy climate is a powerful means for organizations to guide developers toward particular practices of privacy; and that software architectural patterns frame privacy solutions that are used throughout the development process, possibly explaining developers’ preference of policy-based solutions to architectural solutions. Further, we show, through the use of the SCT schema for framing the findings of this study, how a theoretical model of the factors that influence developers’ privacy practices can be conceptualized and used as a guide for future research toward effective implementation of PbD.
Privacy and data protection constitute core values of individuals and of
democratic societies. There have been decades of debate on how those values
-and legal obligations- can be embedded into systems, preferably from the very
beginning of the design process.
One important element in this endeavour are technical mechanisms, known as
privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs). Their effectiveness has been
demonstrated by researchers and in pilot implementations. However, apart from a
few exceptions, e.g., encryption became widely used, PETs have not become a
standard and widely used component in system design. Furthermore, for unfolding
their full benefit for privacy and data protection, PETs need to be rooted in a
data governance strategy to be applied in practice.
This report contributes to bridging the gap between the legal framework and
the available technological implementation measures by providing an inventory
of existing approaches, privacy design strategies, and technical building
blocks of various degrees of maturity from research and development. Starting
from the privacy principles of the legislation, important elements are
presented as a first step towards a design process for privacy-friendly systems
and services. The report sketches a method to map legal obligations to design
strategies, which allow the system designer to select appropriate techniques
for implementing the identified privacy requirements. Furthermore, the report
reflects limitations of the approach. It concludes with recommendations on how
to overcome and mitigate these limits.
In this paper we define the notion of a privacy design strategy. These
strategies help IT architects to support privacy by design early in the
software development life cycle, during concept development and analysis. Using
current data protection legislation as point of departure we derive the
following eight privacy design strategies: minimise, hide, separate, aggregate,
inform, control, enforce, and demonstrate. The strategies also provide a useful
classification of privacy design patterns and the underlying privacy enhancing
technologies. We therefore believe that these privacy design strategies are not
only useful when designing privacy friendly systems, but also helpful when
evaluating the privacy impact of existing IT systems.
Context: Facing the implementation of the EU General Data Protection Regulation in May 2018, many commercial software providers will soon need to adapt their products to new privacy-related constraints. Privacy patterns defined for different aspects of the software engineering process promise to be a useful concept for this task. In this situation, it seems valuable to characterize the state of the research related to privacy patterns. Objective: To identify, characterize and classify the contributions made by published research results related to patterns in the context of considering privacy concerns in engineering software. Method: A literature review in form of a mapping study of scientific articles was performed. The resulting map structures the relevant body of work into multiple dimensions, illustrating research focuses and gaps. Results: Results show that empirical evidence in this field is scarce and that holistic approaches to engineering privacy into software based on patterns are lacking. This potentially hinders industrial adoption. Conclusion: Based on these results, we recommend to empirically validate existing privacy patterns, to consolidate them in pattern catalogues and languages, and to move towards seamless approaches from engineering privacy requirements to implementation.
The issue of incorporating privacy into complex information systems has grown substantially over the past few years. At the same time, the design of converging IT-systems still lacks a structural approach respecting privacy. Similar to software and security engineering, a useful toolkit for system developers would be a set of privacy design patterns. This work evaluates established privacy approaches in video surveillance and smart energy. Common patterns in these two real world scenarios are identified. Based on that, a general structure for a privacy pattern language is proposed.
Software Systems Architecture, Second Edition is a highly regarded, practitioner-oriented guide to designing and implementing effective architectures for information systems. It is both a readily accessible introduction to software architecture and an invaluable handbook of well-established best practices.
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European Parliament and Council of the European Union
European Parliament and Council of the European Union, "General Data
Protection Regulation," Official Journal of the European Union, vol. 119,
2015.