Usable privacy and security for personal information management

IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY, focuses on the design and development of policy SPARCLE, authoring and transformation tools that enable organizations to create machine-readable policies for real-time enforcement decisions. Usable privacy and security technology is a critical need in the management of personal information, and should be a part of the initial design considerations for technology applications, systems, and devices that involves personal information collection, access, and communications. SPARCLE will enable individuals to be able to know that the policies are enforced within the organizations by their own processes. The prototype workbench transforms natural language rules through the use of natural language parsing technology into machine-readable XML code. The tools promise to give organizations a verifiable path from the written form of privacy rule to real-time enforcement decisions regarding access to personal information.