PRIVACY-AVARE: An approach to manage and distribute privacy settings

Privacy enhancing technologies become increasingly necessary as more and more personal data is collected. Especially, as nowadays everybody is permanently online using different applications and devices, users are often lacking the means to effectively control the access to their private data. Existing approaches provide only isolated solutions for one device and are limited in functionality to control data access. Moreover, existing solutions may not be legally compliant and lack usability, especially for non-experts. Therefore, we present an interdisciplinary approach to manage and distribute privacy settings: PRIVACY-AVARE is intended to enable users to centrally determine their data protection preferences and to apply them globally on different devices (mobiles, tablets, smart homes, cars, ...). In this paper, we present PRIVACY-AVARE by first introducing and discussing main functional and non-functional requirements with a special focus on compliance and usability requirements. Based on this discussion, we then develop a conceptual solution. Finally, we discuss the limitations of our approach and give an outlook.