Supporting Privacy Impact Assessments Using Problem-Based Privacy Analysis

Privacy-aware software development is gaining more and more importance for nearly all information systems that are developed nowadays. As a tool to force organizations and companies to consider privacy properly during the planning and the execution of their projects, some governments advise to perform privacy impact assessments (PIAs). During a PIA, a report has to be created that summarizes the consequence on privacy the project may have and how the organization or company addresses these consequences. As basis for a PIA, it has to be documented which personal data is collected, processed, stored, and shared with others in the context of the project. Obtaining this information is a difficult task that is not yet well supported by existing methods. In this paper, we present a method based on the problem-based privacy analysis (ProPAn) that helps to elicit the needed information for a PIA systematically from a given set of functional requirements. Our tool-supported method shall reduce the effort that has to be spent to elicit the information needed to conduct a PIA in a way that the information is as complete and consistent as possible.