Privacy

Our mission is to enable and encourage HP to be a leader in informational privacy technologies, solutions and practices.

What's the problem?

• People want to use their identity, preferences, profiles and privacy policies across multiple trust domains seamlessly
• It's usually someone else that controls and manages people’s personal information - there is increasing concern about this.
• This concern is manifested by a lack of confidence in the safety of online activities by citizens and consumers and results in increasing amounts of privacy regulation by governments worldwide. 
• We want to make it easier for organisations to comply with regulations and delight ordinary people with robust management of their private information.

The provision of informational privacy raises many hard technology research questions.  Amongst these are the roles of technology:

• How to put more rigor into the control and management of personal information by organisations, online communities and individuals?
• How to define, manage, enforce and revoke the specific consents and privacy preferences that people choose about the management of their personal information and increase the level of assurance given them that these are respected by entities that store or use this information?
• How to compel third parties that process personal information to handle it in accordance with agreed policies and make them accountable for so doing?
• How can compliance auditing technology help? What other issues does the act of auditing raise and how can these be solved?
• How to leverage trusted computing technologies to underpin privacy management? 
• How can technology aid the adoption of the personal data minimization principle by IT system designers and make them accountable for their design decisions which affect the collection, storage and use of personal information?
• How can technology and the privacy regulatory regime become better mutually supportive?  What will/should a future privacy regulatory regime look like? What are the implications for people and organisations?
• How will the issues and potential solutions evolve in a Web2.0 environment and beyond?

What are we doing?

• Researching privacy-enhancing system architectures and middleware for:
  • Enforcement of privacy policies and preferences that cover the processing of personal information
  • Policy-driven management of stored personal information
• Developing accountability management technology to encourage better system design choices around personal information
• Researching architectures and technologies to improve the trust, security and privacy available to online communities that use mobile communications systems

Much of the above work is being done with research partners in two collaborative projects. EnCoRe, part funded by the UK government, aims to make giving consent to the storage, use and sharing of personal information as reliable and easy as turning on a tap, and revoking that consent as reliable and easy as turning it off again. See www.encore-project.info. PICOS, part funded by the European Commission, investigates and addresses the trust, security and privacy aspects of mobile online communities. See www.picos-project.eu.

This work is being done by researchers based in Bristol, UK and Princeton, New Jersey.

For more information contact: Pete Bramhall, Senior Project Manager, pete.bramhall@hp.com