A Declarative Data Protection Approach: From Human-Readable Policies To Automatic Enforcement

In recent years, almost any object we use in our lives is connected and able to generate, collect and share data and information. This leads to the need of having, on the one hand, legal regulations, such as the new General Data Protection Regulation, able to guarantee that privacy of humans is preserved within the sharing process, and on the other hand, automatic mechanisms to guarantee that such regulations, in addition to user privacy preferences, are applied. The goal of this work is to propose an approach to manage data protection policy, from their specification in a controlled natural language to their translation into an automatically enforceable policy language, UPOL, for access and usage control of personal information, aiming at transparent and accountable data usage. UPOL extends and combines previous research results, U-XACML and PPL, and it is part of a more general proposal to regulate multi-party data sharing operations. A use case is proposed, considering challenges brought by the new EU's GDPR.