Privacy in the electronic society: Emerging problems and solutions

As the global information infrastructure is becoming more ubiquitous, digital business transactions are increasingly performed using a variety of mobile devices and across multiple communication channels. This new service-oriented paradigm is making the protection of privacy an increasing concern, as it relies on rich context representations (e.g., of location and purpose) and requires users to provide a vast amount of information about themselves and their behavior. This information is likely to be protected by a privacy policy, but restrictions to be enforced may come from different input requirements, possibly under the control of different authorities. In addition, users retain little control over their personal information once it has been disclosed to third parties. Secondary use regulations are therefore increasingly demanding attention. In this paper, we present the emerging trends in the data protection field to address the new needs and desiderata of today’s systems.