Development of a Privacy Addendum for Open Source Licenses: Value Sensitive Design in Industry

Drawing on Value Sensitive Design, we developed a workable privacy addendum for an open source software license that not only covers intellectual property rights while allowing software developers to modify the software (the usual scope of an open source license), but also addresses enduser privacy. One central innovation of our work entails the integration of an informed consent model and a threat model for developing privacy protections for ubiquitous location aware systems. We utilized technology that provided a device’s location information in real-time: Intel’s POLS, a “sister” system to Intel’s Place Lab. In January 2006, POLS was released under a license combining the substantive terms of the Eclipse Public License together with this privacy addendum. In this paper, we describe how we developed the privacy addendum, present legal terms, and discuss characteristics of our design methods and results that have implications for protecting privacy in ubiquitous information systems released in open source.