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As information technology continues to spread, we note an increasing awareness within a variety of organizations of the fundamental need to address security and privacy concerns for stored information (Karat, Karat, Brodie and Feng, 2005). We believe that meeting this need requires an understanding of policies that govern information collection and use accompanied by development of technologies that can assist in authoring, implementing, and monitoring such policies. Our research has focused on understanding the tools and architectures necessary to author and implement policies that govern the storage and use of a variety of sensitive information by organizations, and on understanding the requirements for evaluating the compliance of such policies with high level goals and legislation. This focus emerged through a user-centered design process in which we first examined how privacy was managed in organizations and then developed scenarios along with prototypes to help explore the privacy management needs within organizations. We see this process as a merging of user-centered design ideas from contextual design (Beyer and Holtzblatt, 1998) and scenario-based design (Carroll, 1995).

While personal information has long been considered sensitive, and organizations have developed manual processes and guidelines to keep information confidential, developments in pervasive technology put new demands on such organizations. In considering pervasive technology, we have found it useful to think of “pervasive technology environments”. By this we mean that people exist in environments which are increasingly surrounded by information gathering agents – some human, some technology sensors. In the last few years there has been a growing interest among government, healthcare, and financial organizations, as well as researchers and the general public in collecting, storing and using records in widely available electronic forms (Baumer, Earp, and Payton, 2000; Ball, 2003). For cost effectiveness, standard processes to more easily store and access records are seen as necessary for a variety of organizations. for example, proponents of electronic medical records have argued that if personal information is collected about individuals it can be used to improve the quality of care (Hagen, 2000). While there are considerable technical challenges in creating comprehensive patient records, there is at least one social challenge that also needs to be addressed as such systems are designed – the mechanisms for managing privacy within electronic patient record systems. We see the success of systems in the healthcare arena as dependent on building trust between organizations and people whose data they maintain, on privacy enabled by technology to manage policies within organizations, and on personalization of system functionality enabled by appropriate use of personal information. We believe that these elements are all closely related in considering pervasive technology in general.

We have found that organizations increasingly store sensitive electronic information in environments which include heterogeneous server system environments. Currently they do not have a unified way of defining or implementing privacy or security access control policies that encompass data collected and used by both Web and legacy applications across different server platforms. This makes it difficult for the organizations to put in place proper management and control of sensitive information or to verify that required or intended regulations for the use of information are met by the organization. This finding is not new. Examinations of privacy policy implementations within organizations have not changed the picture much in the past 15 years, with the findings of Smith (1993) largely consistent with our own more recent studies (Karat et al., 2005). While there has been considerable attention to the development and posting of privacy policies on websites (e.g., Jensen and Potts, 2004), almost all of these policies are vague and lack connections to technology that might actually implement them. Based on our findings from working with organizations, we believe that helping to close the gap between the high level policies organizations strive to adhere to and the low level actions carried out within their IT systems is an important topic for research and development.