Privacy as a Product: A case study in the m-Health sector

Abstract

Business models based on offering free services to people in exchange for their data are gaining importance and prevalence. The most prominent examples are social networks and, more recently, mobile social networks. However, this trend is endangering users' privacy. We do not discuss the ethical and legal issues derived from this business model. Notwithstanding, we believe that users might have better and more privacy-aware alternatives enabling them to trade their privacy on their own. Thus, we introduce the concept of “Privacy as a Product” (PaaP) and we propose and describe a framework and a protocol based on the Raykova-Vo-Bellovin-Malkin protocol that enables users to share private data without the need for trusting the infrastructure (e.g. a social network). We show that our proposal is feasible in terms of computational and storage overhead. Hence, our solution opens the door to the new concept of “Privacy as a Product” and could be the foundation for implementations of privacy-aware social networks in which privacy plays a more central role, like in the healthcare sector.