Platform for Enterprise Privacy Practices: Privacy-Enabled Management of Customer Data

Enterprises collect a large amount of personal data about their customers. Even though enterprises promise privacy to their customers using privacy statements or P3P, there is no methodology to enforce these promises throughout and across multiple enterprises. This article describes the Platform for Enterprise Privacy Practices (E-P3P), which defines technology for privacy-enabled management and exchange of customer data. Its comprehensive privacy-specific access control language expresses restrictions on the access to personal data, possibly shared between multiple enterprises. E-P3P separates the enterprise-specific deployment policy from the privacy policy that covers the complete life cycle of collected data. E-P3P introduces a viable separation of duty between the three “administrators” of a privacy system: The privacy officer designs and deploys privacy policies, the security officer designs access control policies, and the customers can give consent while selecting opt-in and opt-out choices.