Towards a UML Profile for Privacy-Aware Applications

Personal information is continuously gathered and processed by modern web applications. Due to regulation laws and to protect the privacy of users, customers, and business partners, such information must be kept private. A recurring problem in constructing web applications and services that protect privacy is the insufficient resources for documenting them. As web applications must be developed consistently with the statements of the privacy policy in order to enforce them, a structured documentation is necessary to model privacy protection during application design. To contribute with solutions to this problem, in this paper we propose a UML profile for privacy-aware applications. This profile helps building UML models that specify and structure particular concepts of privacy and, consequently, improve privacy definition and enforcement. After introducing the main privacy concepts, we describe how they are represented in the UML language. The profile’s ability to model statements of realistic privacy policies is then demonstrated on a case study.