Group Privacy Management based on Privacy Data Envelop

Privacy is a fundamental human right, defined in Article 12 of the 1950 Universal Declaration of Human Rights [1] but technological developments have led to more and more automatic processing and storage of personal information, creating threats to privacy, at both individual and group levels. Several technologies are currently supporting user privacy by limiting the information collected and stored, and deleting it, as soon as it has served its purpose [2][3]. But these technologies focus on how an individual user may disclose information (e.g., his interests) but less on how this user ­ as a member of a group- may disclose information related to the group he belongs to. Indeed, individual privacy has been closely studied [11, 12, 13] while group privacy has been less examined [9]. However, this problem is becoming critical with the recent development of virtual communities (discussion forums, social networking websites...) both in the domain of private life (e.g., group of friends or members of a family) as well as in the professional area (e.g. members of a project or colleagues of a company). In this paper, we present a technology for managing group privacy when data are travelling over the network. Section 2 provides an overview of group privacy and related issues. Section 3 describes our group privacy management approach based on a proposed Privacy Data Envelop concept. Section 4 presents the privacy aware email client as an application of our approach. Finally, conclusions and perspectives are presented in Section 5.