An Approach to Community-Oriented Email Privacy

This paper describes how members of a community can collaboratively protect the privacy of the information they share via email. An extension of email tagging is used to represent communities and establish privacy protection boundaries. The approach is illustrated informally by scenarios and the key concepts are defined formally. The contributions of this paper are: (1) extending the idea of boundary regulation to a community, (2) empowering a community to manage its membership through group consensus and providing awareness of the actions of its members via notifications, and (3) capturing the semantics of this approach in a state-transition system and proving that email sharing is privacy-preserving.