Privacy Patterns in Practice

Abstract

Privacy design patterns are suggested solutions to possible privacy problems. These could possibly be used to assess possible privacy risks in a software system, by determining which patterns were possible and which have been implemented. In this study a first (manual) method was set up to do so, using the documentation and source code to study the data and overall systems at a high-level. Here, the user-data Synchronization function of Firefox and Chromium were studied to identify possible and implemented privacy design patterns. From a small list of privacy design patterns that were investigated, four were possible in both systems and one has been implemented, without the former patterns posing a signif-icant risk to privacy. In conclusion, this study tried to explore a way to study privacy design patterns in practice.

Date of Award	20 Jun 2022
Original language	English
Supervisor	G Alpár (Examiner) & Ebrahim Rahimi (Co-assessor)