A Privacy Manager for Collaborative Working Environments

The ability to collaborate has long been key to the successful completion of tasks. With the availability of current networking and computing power, the creation of Collaborative Working Environments (CWEs) has allowed for this process to occur over virtually any geographic distance. While the strength of a CWE is its ability to allow for the exchange of information freely between collaborators, this opens the participants up to a possible loss of privacy. In this paper, the issue of protecting privacy while collaborating is discussed. To address the privacy concerns that are raised, a generic privacy ontology is presented, along with a Collaborative Privacy Manager (CPM). The generic privacy ontology allows for the creation of privacy policies at several layers of granularity. The architecture of the CPM, consisting of several levels and modules, is introduced. The functions this CPM will play to ensure privacy in collaborative working environments are also detailed. How each module within the Collaborative Working Environment works towards accomplishing each goal is described.