A PET Evaluation Framework for Relational Databases

Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) received much attention from academia and industry lately. However, scant research information on evaluation frameworks regarding PETs is available. Recent developments delineate between different Pets based on high-level principles and privacy concerns. The goal of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, we present a framework for evaluating Pets in general based on acknowledged positive characteristics of Pets sourced from literature. Secondly, we use this framework to demonstrate how different PETs can be evaluated and benchmarked against each other. We performed an experimental evaluation of our recently proposed Hippocratic Privacy Protection (HPP) framework, benchmarking it against other well-published PETs including Hippocratic databases, PRIME/Prime Life and Encore to demonstrate the applicability of the evaluation framework. The main contribution of the paper is the provisioning of a PET evaluation framework based on a number of PET evaluation criteria and features to determine its efficacy in giving individuals control over their personal information. We then outline several future research directions.