Formalizing Privacy Laws for License Generation and Data Repository Decision Automation

TL;DR

This paper presents a formal logic-based expert system to automate data release decisions and generate custom licenses, aiming to streamline legal compliance and decision transparency in data repositories.

Contribution

It introduces a formalization of privacy laws using logic programming to automate data transfer decisions and license generation, reducing reliance on legal experts.

Findings

Automates data release decisions through formalized legal reasoning.

Generates custom data use agreements tailored to specific conditions.

Enhances transparency in legal decision-making processes.

Abstract

In this paper, we summarize work-in-progress on expert system support to automate some data deposit and release decisions within a data repository, and to generate custom license agreements for those data transfers. Our approach formalizes via a logic programming language the privacy-relevant aspects of laws, regulations, and best practices, supported by legal analysis documented in legal memoranda. This formalization enables automated reasoning about the conditions under which a repository can transfer data, through interrogation of users, and the application of formal rules to the facts obtained from users. The proposed system takes the specific conditions for a given data release and produces a custom data use agreement that accurately captures the relevant restrictions on data use. This enables appropriate decisions and accurate licenses, while removing the bottleneck of lawyer effort per data transfer. The operation of the system aims to be transparent, in the sense that administrators, lawyers, institutional review boards, and other interested parties can evaluate the legal reasoning and interpretation embodied in the formalization, and the specific rationale for a decision to accept or release a particular dataset.