Best Security Practices for Protecting Privacy with Open Data

Abstract

The treatment of public open data is a topic that is becoming more and more popular, since it allows encouraging transparency initiatives in governmental entities, as well as in several private companies. This new paradigm has, as one of its central points, the treatment of open data so that they can be manipulated by means of specific techniques with software and services that allow their storage in other databases for their use. This represents a great advantage in terms of transparency in the context of Open Government, however, this data openness exposes several challenges in terms of privacy and security, because it can jeopardize the privacy of citizens if appropriate measures are not implemented.

The objective of this paper is to present an analysis of the state of the art in this context, so, for this purpose, some case studies and practical examples of organizations were analyzed, in order to work on the shortcomings and problems regarding privacy and security in the treatment of public open data. As a next point, we worked on a proposal for a series of good practices and policies to provide adequate protection of data confidentiality. Finally, it was analyzed that the use of these practices could not only improve the protection of available data, but also allow strengthening public confidence in these types of initiatives.