Formal Models for Privacy

The concept of privacy is becoming increasingly important in all of our lives. Unfortunately, however, it is a rather nebulous concept; further, many claim that they consider privacy to be important, yet undertake behaviour that would suggest otherwise — the so-called privacy paradox. As technology becomes more pervasive, the need for assurances that individuals’ privacy is not compromised by that technology necessarily increases. In this paper, we argue that formal methods have a role to play in helping to provide assurances of privacy in a variety of contexts. As an illustration, we give consideration to a particular scenario: that of data sharing.