Issue title: Government Information Sharing and Integration:
Combining the Social and the Technical. Papers from the 9th International
Conference on Digital Government Research (d.g.o.2008)
Affiliations: [a] Georgian Court University, 900 Lakewood Ave, Lakewood,
NJ 08701, USA | [b] City University of New York, College of Staten Island,
Staten Island, NY 10304, USA
Abstract: The Web 2.0 technologies allow dynamic content creation using
syndications or mashups, extracted from diverse data sources, including
government enterprise data. As a primary source of citizen data, the US
government has the obligation not only to make public data available for
citizen access as stated in the Freedom of Information Act, but also to protect
the privacy of individual citizen's records as stated in the Privacy Act. In a
mashup, a third party mashup Web application provider requests the individual's
data from the government agencies through Web services. Since the data is
public data and not necessarily provided through electronic interactions,
individual citizens may not be able to express fine-grained privacy policies on
how data may be used. In addition, the government agency's privacy policy is
very coarse grained, and the relative sensitivity of individual information is
not considered. We discuss the opportunities and issues associated with the
programmable web and mashups, provide a Privacy Protection Model for Mashup
Applications, using a mashup related multi-dimensional privacy protection space
and present policy recommendations to complement the technological solutions.
The model and recommendations include deployment of a personal privacy policy
network, a distributed system over which citizens can publish their individual
privacy policies. These policies are accessible by all web service providers to
be consulted in real time by data providers including government agencies for
the purposes of automated privacy protection reasoning concerning data release.
Keywords: E-government mashup services, citizen privacy, regulatory privacy policy, personal privacy policy network, Web 2.0
