Privacy Policy Workbench: SPARCLE
The rapid advancement of the use of information technology in industry, government,
and academia makes it much easier to collect, transfer, and store personal identifiable
information (PII) around the world. A number of studies show that customers
expect organization with which they have relationship to use their PII in the
manner they intended and protect it as they would as their own assets. However,
many organizations store PII in heterogeneous server system environments and
currently do not have a unified way of defining or implementing privacy policies.
This makes managing data privacy difficult for organizations working to put
in place proper management and control of PI, the data users who access and
work with the PI, and the data subjects who have rights regarding use of their
PII.
SPARCLE is an ongoing research project conducted by Clare-Marie Karat (ckarat@us.ibm.com),
John Karat (jkarat@us.ibm.com) and Carolyn
Brodie (brodiec@us.ibm.com) at the IBM
T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY. SPARCLE enables privacy professionals
in an any given industry to author policies, to translate these policies into
system readable commands, implement these with an enforcement engine and finally
run reports to monitor the effectiveness of the policy implementation and accesses
of individual data subject personal information.
| The policy creation capabilities in SPARCLE allow
organizational users to create |
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rules that define the types of data user, |
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the data they can access, |
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the actions they can take, |
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the purpose for using the PII, |
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the conditions they need to abide by while processing PII,
and |
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the obligations they must fulfill if they do use the data. |
SPARCLE was designed to support users with a variety of skills by allowing
individuals responsible for the creation of privacy policies to define the
policies using natural language or to use a structured format to define the
elements and rule relationships that will be directly used in the machine
readable policy.
SPARCLE keeps the two formats synchronized. For users who prefer authoring
with natural language, SPARCLE transforms the policy into a structured form
so that the author can review it and then transforms it into a machine
readable format. SPARCLE translates the policies of organizational users
who prefer to author rules using a structured format into both a natural
language format and the machine readable version. During the entire
privacy policy authoring phase, users can switch between the natural
language and structured views of the policy for viewing and editing
purposes. Once the machine readable policy is created, it is possible to
employ any enforcement engine that is capable of using the elements of the
standardized privacy policy language to ensure the policy is enforced for
data stored in the organization's on-line data stores.
The policy implementation Using SPARCLE, the team is exploring methods for
implementing their privacy policies within their organization by providing
methods for mapping policy elements to access control lists, databases, and
applications within their configurations.
Finally, the compliance checking functionality in SPARCLE allows
organizations to run reports to understand what data accesses are being
allowed and denied by the policy and to see all accesses to particular
customers, patients, or constituents data.
What are SPARCLE project's business value: According to May 2002 survey, 42%
of the sample of 170 Web sites did not provide any kind of privacy statement
even though all sites surveyed collected at least some personally identifiable
information. Having privacy statements displayed on enterprises' Web site is
a good practice; however, execution of the privacy policies and the PII management
at the application and business process level are challenges that enterprises
face today. SPARCLE provide a privacy policy management ability both at the
online and legacy applications levels across different server platforms.
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