PANDIA/en

PANDIA: Platform for the analysis of privacy notices of interactive assistance systems in the health care domain - Consumer-centered privacy communication

Contact: Tobias Dehling, Mandy Goram

Project Status: active

Description

Objective:

The objective of the PANDIA project is to develop a platform that enables consumers and companies in the health care domain to automatically check information processing in interactive assistance systems (eg, electronic health records, mHealth apps). Within the scope of PANDIA, we will develop solutions that inform all interested stakeholders what information is stored, transmitted, or processed by whom, in which way, for what purposes, and at which location in interactive assistance systems.

Background:

Privacy notices of today’s interactive assistance systems in the health care domain are usually overly long and not informative for lay users, due to their legal jargon. As a consequence, consumers remain unaware of the specific terms of use and how their information is used. The PANDIA project will remedy the intransparency of information use in the health care domain. By applying natural language processing (NLP) algorithms, the information essential for consumers will be extracted from privacy notices. Legal and complicated formulations will be simplified, enriched with visualizations, and communicated in an informative way without breaking legal compliance. How consumers’ information is used in the health care domain will be abstracted from various sources (eg, apps, websites, privacy notices) and converted into a machine-readable format. The extracted data will be processed and stored in object databases and represented with semantic graphs for further processing steps. To maintain legal compliance, benchmarking parameters will be defined and evaluated. Finally, all discovered information will be integrated into the knowledge platform Pandipedia and communicated with intuitive communication interfaces. At first, we focus on intuitive communication interfaces for three main consumer-focused functionalities: privacy trajectories, privacy alerts, and privacy comparisons. Privacy trajectories enable consumers to track changes in privacy practices over time. Privacy alerts inform consumers in a personalized way about all changes in information use of interest to them. Privacy comparisons will allow consumers to choose those health care solutions they need while avoiding violations of privacy preferences. Later on in the project, we will develop and evaluate further innovative communication interfaces based on findings from user studies to make information use in the health care domain even more traceable and transparent for consumers. Finally, we examine key findings of our field studies and evaluations to provide design patterns and recommendations on how to design and develop privacy communication interfaces in the health care domain and beyond.