Analysing Privacy Analyses

The debate on people’s right to privacy and on the meaning of privacy is ongoing worldwide, for example in Europe over the newly adopted General Data Protection Regulation. By contrast, works in the area of formal e-voting privacy analysis, which aim at assessing the privacy preservation of a target e-voting system by means of mathematical rigour, appear to have reached a well-known plateau. This plateau is called indistinguishability. However, also other works look at privacy from a formal standpoint, though on different grounds. Notable ones are unlinkability and minimal information disclosure. This paper provides a contrastive argument about the three mentioned approaches by discussing the intuition behind each of them and by assessing their respective pros and cons. The ultimate aim is to revamp the privacy debate also at the level of formal analysis.