Land of the lost: privacy patterns' forgotten properties: enhancing selection-support for privacy patterns

ABSTRACTPrivacy patterns describe core aspects of privacy-enhancing solutions to recurring problems and can, therefore, be instrumental to the privacy-by-design paradigm. However, the privacy patterns domain is still evolving. While the main focus is currently put on compiling and structuring high-quality privacy patterns in catalogs, the support for developers to select suitable privacy patterns is still limited. Privacy patterns selection-support means, in essence, the quick and easy scoping of a collection of patterns to the most applicable ones based on a set of predefined criteria. To evaluate patterns against these criteria, a thorough understanding of the privacy patterns landscape is required. In this paper, (i) we show that there is currently a lack of extensive support for privacy patterns selection due to the insufficient understanding of pattern properties, (ii) we propose additional properties that need to be analyzed and can serve as a first step towards a robust selection criteria, (iii) we analyze and present the properties for 70 privacy patterns, and (iv) we discuss a potential approach of how such a selection-support method can be realized.