Section: New Results

Capacity: an Abstract Model of Control over Personal Data

Participant : Daniel Le Metayer.

While the control of individuals over their personal data is increasingly seen as an essential component of their privacy, the word “control” is usually used in a very vague way, both by lawyers and by computer scientists. This lack of precision may lead to misunderstandings and makes it difficult to check compliance. To address this issue, we propose a formal framework based on capacities to specify the notion of control over personal data and to reason about control properties. We illustrate our framework with social network systems and show that it makes it possible to characterize the types of control over personal data that they provide to their users and to compare them in a rigorous way.