Preserving Privacy of Integrated E-Government Information: Architecture Approach

Governments often begin their e-government initiatives by automating their services. Service automation requires integrating different information from various government entities to make the e-services more effective, efficient, and accessible. This enables government entities to integrate their data through electronic channels that are not restricted by time or locations, which may lead to privacy breach or misuse during information exchange. On the other hand, many government regulators have begun to enact some data protection regulations by forcing service providers to embed privacy into the design specifications and architecture of the integrated services to make it as a key enabling factor for data protection. This study investigates the challenges to design an e-government architecture using the optimal business tool together with the most efficient service design approach where it can protect privacy from misuse. From a privacy perspective, the main contributions of this study are to identify reasonable requirements for protecting privacy, to determine the best method that can align the business logic with the technical approaches, and to propose a privacy architecture approach based on aligned tools. Thus, the purpose of this study is to find the optimal method to protect integrated e-government information from an architecture point of view. Therefore, the study is driven by the importance of achieving a trustworthy e-government initiative.