Otherwise known in PhD land as ‘Contributions’; a nice way of summarizing the things you learned a long the way that may or may not have anything to do with your actual dissertation topic.
My research is a unique approach that applies concepts, tools and techniques to advance a theory of privacy and a formal model. It extends the notion of computer science aided privacy by introducing decision based thresholds and dynamicity. The formal model created is evaluated against existing methods and adds significant value based on principles of scientific theory. And, the formal model also significantly advances the discussion of privacy.
I developed eight observable principles for the way privacy behaves, confirming some of our existing knowledge and proposing new unique principles based on the formal model. In particular, the work demonstrates and solves for the transitivity of privacy as it is not simply a representation of the privacy state of an individual at a given point in time. My model can follow along each personal information disclosure with every data subject at every point in time throughout a day. It is a tool for allowing systems to think about how information is shared along a network of organizations, people and processes.
As the formalization developed, some additional distinctive ‘contributions’ were identified.
- I accidentally created of an information management based framework for classifying computing services in respect of the collection, use and disclosure of personal information.
- I evaluate computational science models in respect of representing historically social scientific concepts.
- Literature reviews in privacy cross disciplines, thus providing an opportunity to computer scientists to understand the differential nature of privacy in multiple fields (lots of reading, and lots of overlap).
- Developing the concept of positive and negative thresholds for privacy providing for system dynamicity.
- Proof, using available evidence, that it is not a common organizational practice for Ontario healthcare organizations to conduct privacy impact assessments (as required under various health regulations).
That last one was a doozy. Sneak preview: one hospital administrator was so upset upon receiving my Freedom of Information request, he called my thesis supervisor. to complain. Unbelievable.