Hat tip to Helena Haapio for sending these on:
Two different websites chronicling ways to protect people’s data privacy online.
There is Prvacypatterns.org and PrivacyPatterns.EU.
Both sites lay out distinct visual and tech strategies to protect people’s privacy from bad actors, or even corporations.
Both versions involve a similar group of collaborators. Their goal is to create a pattern library that can be used across projects — learning from individual experiments and research, to make more generalizable strategies.
Privacy represents a broad variety of concerns — subjective, contextual, hard-to-define — that real people have about the flows of personal information.
Translating these concerns (as well as corporate and legal liability) into technical artifacts — a process known generally as “privacy-by-design” — has proven difficult. How can we best convert lawyer speak into engineering speak? How can problems be elegantly anticipated early in the development process?
Drawing inspiration from Christopher Alexander and the success of software design patterns in improving communication about tried-and-true practices, we hope privacy patterns will:
standardize language for privacy-preserving technologies
document common solutions to privacy problems
help designers identify and address privacy concerns
Our goal is for this to be a living document constructed by the community of engineers, designers, lawyers and regulators involved in this topic.
Both sites are cross-Atlantic efforts, largely driven by university researchers. It’s an open effort, asking people from the community to also submit ways that they have figured out how to protect people’s privacy online.
