Linked USDL Privacy: Describing Privacy Policies for Services

Abstract

As the provision of services and the use of personal data expands, the need for services to explicitly detail what personal data a service handles and in which manner becomes paramount in order to achieve a fully transparent, ethical and personalized user experience. Services usually require access to sensitive information and may distribute this information to third parties. Service consumers need to be informed about the ways their data are used and about the actors involved in this process. Universal service descriptions that can be used to cover any business service are required to provide interoperability. In this paper, we describe our work on the privacy module for the Linked Unified Service Description Language (USDL). We expand the language by introducing a new module that allows the specification of privacy properties for business services. We have considered recent advances in data protection for its creation and provide a method, accompanied by a software tool, to examine the validity of privacy policy descriptions with Linked USDL Privacy module.