Privacy Management, the Law & Business Strategies: A Case for Privacy Driven Design

This paper explores the adage that good privacy is good business. Businesses, like social networks, often seek to create value from personal information and monetize it. Unlocking and harvesting value embedded in personal information can lead to disclosure of private and sensitive information, and subsequent harm. Personal information management practices can be a means to competitive and strategic advantage, however they are also subject to privacy law. We explore the underlying tension between transparency and disclosure in the privacy verses business strategy in the pursuit of innovation arena, and argue that in order achieve sustained innovation next generation applications and services will require a fresh imaginative and strategic privacy by design approach. Personal information management is a complex task and cannot be adequately achieved without significant attention and commitment to privacy requirements in systems analysis and design. Due to the potential power, magnitude, complexity and scope of web technologies there is a pressing need to understand privacy requirements better, and to invest in developing tools and techniques for modeling, analyzing, designing and building more effective personal information management systems that seek consent where appropriate and that offer users natural choices and sophisticated mechanisms for controlling their personal information.