IoT applications require both software and hardware to cooperate across multiple nodes with different capabilities, creating complexity that often causes privacy considerations to be overlooked during development. Regulations such as GDPR demand privacy by design, yet developers of IoT systems frequently lack practical tools and methodologies to embed privacy thinking from the earliest stages of the software lifecycle. This project develops an interactive design methodology to integrate privacy-preserving techniques into IoT application development. The research creates PRIVACY PARROT, an interactive collaborative tool designed for use by business analysts, requirements engineers, UX designers, and software engineers. The tool provides a library of privacy patterns that map common IoT data flows to appropriate mitigation strategies, enabling teams to reason about privacy risks during requirements gathering and architectural design.
The project reviews existing design notations and tools for capturing non-functional requirements, then co-designs a privacy-aware IoT methodology through workshops. Industry practitioners and academic partners including PETRAS, My Data Fix, and Obeo contribute expertise to ensure that the resulting methodology addresses real-world development challenges and integrates smoothly into existing workflows.
Evaluation studies assess the tool’s effectiveness in enhancing engineers’ privacy knowledge and awareness. The findings demonstrate that structured privacy guidance during design leads to more privacy-considerate IoT applications across both regulated and unregulated domains, providing evidence that early-stage privacy tooling can meaningfully improve outcomes for end users.
UK national centre exploring privacy, ethics, trust, reliability, and security for IoT systems.
Data privacy consultancy providing regulatory expertise and global data protection leadership.
Provider of open modelling software such as Sirius and Acceleo.
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), Volume 7, Issue 1, March 2023.
ACM Transactions on Internet of Things (TIOT), Volume 5, Issue 1, February 2024.
UbiComp/ISWC '22 Adjunct, September 2022.