Accountability for Abstract Component Design

The importance of the services-based market, 62.9% of the World gross domestic product (GDP) [1], triggered an increase in the use of software offered on-line as services (SaaS). The use of such software usually implies the flow of personal data on-line between several parties. This can make users reluctant to their use. In this work, we consider this issue at the design-time of the software and we propose some foundations for an accountable software design. Accountability for a software is a property describing, among other aspects, its liability to end-users for the usage of the data it has been entrusted. We propose to enrich software´s component design by accountability clauses using an abstract accountability language (AAL). We also define conditions for the well-formedness of an accountable component design and show how they can be checked using a model-checking tool.