Towards Models for Privacy Preservation in the Face of Metadata Exploitation

Abstract

It is well understood that today's society generates enormous volumes of data, with much of that data being used to drive the emerging digital data economy. However, due to dataveillance and related concerns, the magnitude and specificity of this data has given rise to well documented privacy concerns. Amongst these concerns is the unregulated collection of online metadata. Despite being commonly used, metadata is a term that few understand. Yet its richness, prevalence and collection has serious implications for many. In this paper we describe initial work with regards to a means of allowing users to control access to metadata pertaining to them, with a view to addressing these implications. To do so, we leverage the work of the Solid data decentralisation project and build upon the notion of Category-Based Access Control.