After GDPR enforcement in May 2018, the problem of implementing privacy by design and staying compliant with regulations has been more prominent than ever for businesses of all sizes, which is evident from frequent cases against companies and significant fines paid due to non-compliance. Consequently, numerous research works have been emerging in this area. Yet, to this moment, no publicly available model can offer a comprehensive representation of privacy policies written in natural language, that is machine-readable, interoperable and suitable for automatic compliance checking. Meanwhile, privacy policies stay one of the main means of communication between a business (Data Controller) and a Data Subject, when it comes to the use of personal data. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model for fine-grained representation of privacy policies. We reuse and adapt existing Semantic Web resources in the spirit of interoperability. We represent our model as an ODRL profile and demonstrate how existing privacy policies can be translated into ODRL-like policies, consisting of deontic rules. We enrich our model with vocabularies for describing personal data processing in great detail, making it suitable for further usage in downstream applications, such as access control tools, to support adoption and implementation of privacy by design. We also demonstrate our model’s capability of handling personal data processing rules in other types of documents, namely data processing agreements, essential for controlling data privacy in a relationship between a Controller and a Processor.
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Krasnashchok K., Mustapha M., Al Bassit A., Skhiri S. Towards Privacy Policy Conceptual Modeling. In Dobbie G., Frank U., Kappel G., Liddle S.W., Mayr H.C. (eds), Proc. of the 39th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, LNCS 12400, 2020. Springer, Cham.