Fuzzy-based Severity Evaluation in Privacy Problems: an Application to Healthcare

The growing diffusion of smart pervasive applications is starting to mine personal privacy: from Internet of Things to Machine Learning, the opportunities for privacy loss are many. As for other concerns involving people and goods as financial, safety and security, researchers and practitioners have defined in time different risk assessment procedures to have repeatable and accurate ways of detecting, quantifying and managing the (possible) source of privacy loss. This paper defines a methodology to deal with privacy risk assessment, overcoming the traditional dichotomy between qualitative (easy to apply) and quantitative (accurate) approaches. The present paper introduces an approach based on fuzzy logic, able to conjugate the benefits of both techniques. The feasibility of the proposed methodology is demonstrated using a healthcare case study.