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On the Philosophical Foundations of Privacy: Five Theses

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The Practice of Enterprise Modeling (PoEM 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 432))

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Abstract

Privacy has emerged as a key concern for companies that deal with Personal Information (PI) since they need to comply with certain privacy requirements. Unfortunately, these requirements are often incomplete or inaccurate due to the vagueness of the privacy concept. This paper tries to tackle this problem, contributing to the philosophical foundations of privacy by addressing several foundational questions such as What is privacy? What makes information a PI? Is PI a property? Do we own our PI? To what extent we are entitled to protect our PI? How do we protect our PI? After answering the aforementioned questions, we characterize the privacy concept that allows providing a more precise and meaningful conceptualization of privacy requirements, which may improve dealing with them during the design of privacy-aware systems.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A negative right exists unless someone acts to negate it, while a positive right is a right to be subjected to an action of another person or group.

  2. 2.

    In [17], privacy requirements were further specialized into more refined concepts such as confidentiality, anonymity, unlinkability, unobservability, notice, minimization, transparency, accountability, and the right to erasure/ be forgotten.

  3. 3.

    For reasons of readability, multiplicity and other constraints have been left out.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Mohamad Gharib

  2. University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Mohamad Gharib

  3. University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    John Mylopoulos

Authors
  1. Mohamad Gharib
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  2. John Mylopoulos
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Correspondence to Mohamad Gharib .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. KU Leuven, LIRIS, Leuven, Belgium

    Estefanía Serral

  2. Stockholm University, Kista, Sweden

    Janis Stirna

  3. University of Geneva, Carouge, Switzerland

    Jolita Ralyté

  4. Riga Technical University, Riga, Latvia

    Jānis Grabis

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Gharib, M., Mylopoulos, J. (2021). On the Philosophical Foundations of Privacy: Five Theses. In: Serral, E., Stirna, J., Ralyté, J., Grabis, J. (eds) The Practice of Enterprise Modeling. PoEM 2021. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 432. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91279-6_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91279-6_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-91278-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-91279-6

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