A Selection Model of Privacy Patterns

Privacy has become an increasingly essential quality to consider in a software system. Privacy practices should be adopted from the first stage of software design to safeguard personal data from unintentional information leakage. Privacy patterns have been investigated by academic and industry practitioners to address different privacy issues. The presence of these patterns is both helpful and challenging for the designer. On one hand, the privacy patterns are valuable as reusable design solutions to solve common privacy problems. On the other hand, the multitude of privacy patterns makes the choice of patterns as solutions difficult for the designer. In this paper, we propose a selection model that can assist architects in deciding suitable patterns for a software system. The selection is based on the regulatory entities and architectural characteristics implicit in the patterns. We evaluate the proposed selection model through case studies and interviews with practitioners. Our evaluation accesses the applicability and usefulness of the selection model in guiding the pattern selection for architectural design and understanding the rationale of different design decisions.