Towards Building User-Centric Privacy-Respecting Collaborative Applications

Abstract

The Internet is accepted as the de facto information support system in most areas of our professional and leisure life. Nowadays, a shift from single-user-centered usage to support multi-user needs can be observed either in professional life (e.g. when participating in collaborative business processes) and in leisure life activities (e.g. when participating in non-profit communities). The needed environment is provided through collaborative systems and social software (e.g. wikis, blogs, etc.). These environments provide e.g. shared workspaces, where collaborative processes and activities like document sharing, group formation, coordination and communication activities, etc. can take place. For this, collaborative settings need some degree of user’s information disclosure (e.g. partial or full identity revelation). Depending on the actual context and a users sensitivity to a (partial) loss of privacy in a given context a users trust in a system handling privacy is crucial for its acceptance and overall success. Many end-user expectations are covered by functional requirements (FRs), most end-user preferences (e.g. usability, response time) and concerns (e.g. privacy, security) are non-functional requirements (NFRs). Considering current approaches, nonfunctional requirements in general and being of special relevance in this context privacy requirements are not considered adequately in the development process and will become one key issue in future software development processes. In this short paper, we present four requirements derived from a case study in collaborative system design and implementation (CURE, s. [1] for details). A framework for adequate (i.e. earlier) consideration of NFR (e.g. privacy) is outlined.