The principle of Data Quality from the Fair Information Practices insinuates that the information that is obtained from the users should be applied to their benefit:
| “Personal data should be relevant to the purposes for which they are to be used, and, to the extent necessary for those purposes, should be accurate, complete and kept up-to-date.” |
Giovanni Iachello and Gregory D. Abowd use this as a starting point and elaborate the principle of proportionality:
| “Any application, system, tool or process should balance its utility with the rights to privacy (personal, informational, etc.) of the involved individuals” |
Based on this principle, they propose the Proportionality design method:
Proportionality Design Method
During the whole development cycle of the application, the different parts need to verify the legitimacy, appropriateness and adequacy of the application:
- Legitimacy: Verify that the application is useful to the user. What is the function that the application cover?
- Appropriateness:Analyse if the alternative implementations with the different technologies satisfy the goal of the application without supposing a risk for the privacy of the users?
- Adequacy: Analyse if the different alternative technologies are correctly implemented.
Sources:
G. Iachello and G. D. Abowd, “Privacy and proportionality: adapting legal evaluation techniques to inform design in ubiquitous computing,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, 2005, pp. 91–100.