Master's Thesis Ali Asaf Polat

Conducting an Overview of Privacy Legislation, Regulation, and Standards as a Means to Improve Education on Data Privacy Compliance

Abstract

Recently, there is a significant development in Data Privacy and its implementation in the industry. Understanding technical and legal dependencies is crucial for projects with high privacy risks since it allows for the identification of potential issues or risks that may affect the development, implementation, and maintenance of a project or product. With rising data gathering from the end-user and potential risks of it, most companies are concerned about their business model regarding handling data privacy.  It can be challenging for people in the legal, technical, and business fields to effectively communicate with each other to ensure privacy. Clearly, a lack of access to appropriate educational resources is a crucial factor in this difficulty.

This thesis aims to explore methods to structure and classify legal regulations in a sustainable and efficient manner, to facilitate understanding and compliance. To do that, the concept of Learning Nuggets, a structured set of educational texts and exercises on specific topics, will be used. Foremost, existing regulations and their relations will be examined, and key concepts will be studied. Secondly, general educational concepts will be extracted from the legal regulations for privacy compliance. The information will then be condensed and organized to ensure that learners can comprehend it effectively. After creating nuggets, they will be integrated into an existing e-learning platform called LACE, which is a learning platform for Privacy-Enhancing Technologies. In this way, platform users will also be informed about legal regulations. 

The deliverable will be educational concepts related to privacy compliance and legal regulations targeting educators in academia, in organizations, or working in consultancies. The main goal is to present a structured and classified collection of topics that is easy to understand by learners. Also, bringing these concepts into an existing e-learning platform and meeting them with practitioners.

Research Questions

1. What are the predominant data privacy laws, regulations, and standards?
2. What are the existing approaches that have been taken to educate on the topics of data privacy compliance?
3. What are the most important aspects practitioners should know about regarding data privacy laws, regulations, and standards?
4. How can this knowledge be synthesized to be represented on an e-learning platform?