Towards Organizational Privacy Patterns

Privacy has been a hot topic and received a lot of discussion in recent years. European legislation contains strong privacy oriented regulations and rules which are poorly understood and comprehended by European businesses. Unfortunately courts do not have enough practice to bring the privacy abuses to justice. In addition to all this privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) that exist today are not enough to solve the contradicting requirements of informational systems resulting from business environments and privacy regulations. A large gap exists between privacy regulations on one hand and available privacy technologies on the other. We believe that this gap could and should be bridged by organizational privacy patterns (OPP). OPPs are abstractions of real world situations and problems that businesses run into. Organizational Privacy Patterns capture the problem, the context of the generic problem and the proven solutions to the problem. In this paper we present a first set of privacy organizational patterns.