Privacy policies, tools and mechanisms of the future

Although many believe that we have lost the battle for privacy, protection of what's left of the user's privacy is all the more important. Not only should a user be able to minimize the disclosure of her personal data, she should also have rights to decide what happens with her data once they have been disclosed. In order to minimize user interaction when deciding whether or not to reveal personal data, privacy policy languages were developed. However, these languages are inadequate and cannot properly deal with the complex interactions between users, service providers, third parties, identity providers and others. Also, tool support for composing and verifying these policies and mechanisms for enforcing them are lagging behind. This paper argues the need for better privacy policies and proposes some solutions. Throughout the paper, our statements are applied to three sample applications in three different domains: e-health, banking and social networks.