Identity Management and 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 such private information - there is increasing concern about this.
• This concern is manifested by a lack of confidence in the safety of online activities by potential users and 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 and keep more control and visibility over their personally identifiable information (PII)?
• How to define, manage and enforce the privacy preferences and obligations of PII users and increase the level of assurance given to PII subjects about how it is handled?
• How to compel third parties that deal with PII to handle it in accordance with agreed policies and make them accountable for so doing?
• How to inform the subjects of PII that others will conform to agreed policies?
• How can 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? 
• Do we need a Privacy Management Framework?  What does it look like? What are its implications for people and organizations?

What are we doing?

• Supporting the enterprise by privacy enhancing middleware
  - Enforcement of privacy policies
  - Personal data lifecycle management
  - Audit and accountability

• Privacy-preserving computation
  - Document redaction integrity

Some of the above work is being done within PRIME, a 4-year, 20 organization research project, funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme and the Swiss Federal Office for Education and Science, to research and develop approaches and solutions for privacy-enhancing identity management that can empower European citizens to exercise their privacy rights, and thus enable them to gain trust and confident in the Information Society.  The project website is at www.prime-project.eu.org .

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

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