Privacy Level Agreements for Public Administration Information Systems

Improving Public Administration (PA) operations and services is a major focus globally; they should be transparent, accountable and provide services that improve citizens’ confidence and trust. In this context, it is important that PAs have the ability to define agreements between citizens and PAs and that such agreements can be used in the context of PAs Information Systems to specify citizens’ privacy needs, provide feedback on data sharing and enable PA departments to analyse privacy threats and vulnerabilities, compliance with laws and regulations and analyse trust relationships. We propose the use of the concept of Privacy Level Agreement (PLA) to address the aforementioned issues. The PLA is formally specified, based on an XML schema, which enables its automated use.