Privacy has become a significant concern in modern society as personal information about individuals is increasingly collected, used, and shared, often using digital technologies, by a wide range of organizations. To mitigate privacy concerns, organizations are required to respect privacy laws in regulated sectors (e.g., HIPAA in healthcare, GLBA in financial sector) and to adhere to self-decla...

As children increasingly use the Internet, there have been mounting concerns about their privacy online. As a result, the U.S. Congress enacted the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) to prohibit websites from collecting information from children under 13 years of age without verifiable parental consent. Unfortunately, few technologies are available for parents to provide this cons...

In view of the legislations on privacy, we address the issue of limiting non-technical responsibility of the administrators of a computer network. A primary concern regards the anonymity of channels within a local network. Solutions proposed in the literature increase significantly the traffic. In this paper we argue that it is possible to implement anonymous and private channels in a local net...

Agents interacting in open environments such as Internet are often in charge of personal information. In order to protect the privacy of human users, such agents have to be aware of the normative context regarding personal data protection (applicable laws and other regulations). These privacy-related norms usually refer to deadlines and durations. To represent these regulations, we introduce th...

Privacy is a simple term for two complicated concepts. At its most basic layer, privacy is always about people and their control of their personal information. Information privacy protects individuals by protecting information about them from unauthorized disclosure (think compliance with FERPA, HIPAA, IRB regulations, or state breach notification laws). Autonomy privacy protects individuals by...

Privacy-enhancing personalized (PEP) systems address individual users’ privacy preferences as well as privacy laws and regulations. Building such systems entails modeling two different domains: privacy constraints as mandated by law and modeled by legal professionals and software architecture as dictated by available software components and modeled by software architects. Both can evolve indepe...

This paper outlines some basic characteristics of digital rights management (DRM) systems, as well as the ways that DRM systems can threaten user privacy. The author asserts that consent-based privacy laws are alone insufficient to address privacy threats posed by DRM. The author suggests that privacy norms can be infused in DRM design and implementation and that the interests of end-users, DRM...

This Note examines, in three parts, presumed consent laws as they pertain to organ donation. Part I discusses presumed consent and explains the salient features of presumed consent laws. It then discusses case law that addresses the aftermath of unauthorized organ or tissue harvesting. Part II evaluates the United States Supreme Court’s evolving conceptions of the rights of individual and famil...

Numerous countries around the world have enacted privacy-protection legislation, in an effort to protect their citizens and instill confidence in the valuable business-to-consumer E-commerce industry. These laws will be most effective if and when they establish a standard of practice that consumers can use as a guideline for the future behavior of e-commerce vendors. However, while privacy-prot...