The Wicked Problem of Privacy : Design Challenge for Crypto-based Solutions

Data privacy has been growing in importance in recent years, especially with the continuous increase of online activity. Researchers study, design, and develop solutions aimed at enhancing users’ data privacy. The wicked problem of data privacy is a continuous challenge that defies straightforward solutions. Since there are many factors involved in data privacy, such as technological, legal, and human aspects, we can only aim at mitigating rather than solving this wicked problem. Our aim was to focus on human aspects for designing usable crypto-based privacy-enhancing solutions. In this thesis, we followed a user centered design method by using empirical qualitative means for investigating user’s perceptions and opinions of our solutions. Most of our work has focused on redactable signatures in the cloud context within the eHealth use-case. Redactable signatures are a privacy enhancing scheme allowing to remove parts of a signed document by a specified party for achieving data minimization without invalidating the respective signature. We mainly used semi-structures interviews and focus groups in our investigations. Our results yielded key HCI considerations as well as guidelines of different means for supporting the design of future solutions.Data privacy has been growing in importance in recent years, especially with the continuous increase of online activity. Researchers continuously study, design, and develop solutions aimed at enhancing users’ data privacy. The wicked problem of data privacy is the continuous challenge that defies straightforward solutions. Since there are many factors involved in data privacy, such as technological, legal, and human aspects, we can only aim at mitigating rather than solving this wicked problem. Our aim was to focus on human aspects for designing usable crypto-based privacy-enhancing solutions. In this thesis, we followed a user centered design method by using empirical qualitative means for investigating user’s perceptions and opinions of our solutions. Most of our work has focused on redactable signatures in the cloud context within an eHealth use-case. Redactable signatures are a privacy-enhancing scheme, which allow the removal of parts of a signed document by a specified party without invalidating the respective signature. Our results yielded key HCI considerations as well as guidelines of different means for supporting the design of future solutions.Paper 3 was included as manuscript in the thesis.