A framework for preserving privacy in e-government

Today the world is relying heavily on the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in performing daily tasks and governments are no exception. Governments around the world are utilising latest ICT to provide government services in the form of electronic services (e-services) in a phenomena called the electronic government (e-government). These services vary from providing general information to the provision of advanced services. However, one of the major obstacles facing the adoption of e-government services is the challenging privacy issues arising from the sharing of user’s information between government agencies and third parties. Many privacy frameworks have been proposed by governments and researchers to tackle these issues, however, the adoption of these frameworks is limited as they lack the consideration of users’ perspective. This thesis uses Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) to investigate the concepts relevant to e-government, and preserving privacy in the context of e-government. Using SSM, Conceptual Models(CMs) relevant to the concepts under investigation were developed and used to review and to identify the limitations of existing frameworks in the literature and to determine the requirements for preserving privacy in an e-government context. A general framework for Privacy REquirements in E-GOVernment (PRE_EGOV) is proposed based on the developed CMs. The proposed framework considers the perspectives of relevant stakeholders and the ownership rights of information about users. The CM relevant to preserving privacy and the elements of the PRE_EGOV framework were evaluated against stakeholders’ perspectives using a survey. The applicability of the proposed framework is demonstrated by applying it on a real world case study. The insight gained from the analysis of the case study and the survey’s results increased confidence in the usefulness of the proposed framework and showed that a system thinking approach to tackle such complex, multi-disciplinary problem can result in a promising solution that is more likely to be accepted by involved stakeholders. The work in this research has been published in three full papers and a poster. The developed Conceptual Models and proposed framework have found acceptance in E-government research community [1, 2, 3, 4] as well as in other research communities [5]