A Privacy-Aware Conceptual Model for Handling Personal Data

Handling personal data adequately is one of the biggest challenges of our era. Consequently, law and regulations are in the process of being released, like the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which attempt to deal with these challenging issue early on. The core question motivating this work is how software developers can validate their technical design vis-a-vis the prescriptions of the privacy legislation. In this paper, we outline the technical concepts related to privacy that need to be taken into consideration in a software design. Second, we extend a popular design notation in order to support the privacy concepts illustrated in the previous point. Third, we show how some of the prescriptions of the privacy legislation and standards may be related to a technical design that employs our enriched notation, which would facilitate reasoning about compliance.