A survey of personal privacy protection in public service mashups

Mashups are web application hybrids built from usually independent online services and information sources, commonly for purposes that differ from the original reasons those services were developed in the first place. The intent is usually to make data more useful, often through visualisation, combination, aggregation or the application of distributed expertise. Mashups rely on APIs to leverage content or functionality. APIs come in many varieties and mashup development is often considered an exercise in spaghetti deployment. This means that mashups are not always well-engineered; that they´re often brittle; inconsistent; difficult to maintain; and susceptible to unexpected changes at the whim of service and data providers. Mashups are nevertheless important in the light of growing trends in open government and government-community partnership initiatives such as the UK´s Big Society, which aim to maximise access to and utilisation of data, functionality and expertise in the community interest. However, these applications have critical privacy requirements. The nature of mashups and the environments within which they are built and maintained mean that they are not naturally well-suited to the protection of privacy. This paper surveys the privacy issues relating to public service mashups as key components of open government and the digital society.