Formal Methods for Analyzing Privacy Policies

With the fast spread of the online services and the huge growth in the collection of users¿ private data, there is a growing interest both by governments and enterprises to establish rules and policies for collecting, processing, and storing users¿ private data. These somewhat informally written privacy policies must be interpreted carefully in the software interface. To better interpret and analyze privacy policies, we need a language suited to the structure of the privacy policies, capable of supporting privacy policies designing methods like referencing to different locations of the policy text. Another issue of growing interest is exploring the compliance of enterprise designed privacy policies with legal privacy policies, or comparing and contrasting the current policies and checking their proper enforcement. Therefore, there is a need for languages that enable automatic exploration of properties with mechanisms for formally contrasting and comparing privacy policies. This book reviews formal methods application in analyzing privacy policies and investigate their potential to address the above mentioned issues.