Privacy is linking permission to purpose

The last years have seen a peak in privacy related research. The focus has been mostly on how to protect the individual from being tracked, with plenty of anonymizing solutions. We advocate another model that is closer to the "physical" world: we consider our privacy respected when our personal data is used for the purpose for which we gave it in the first place. Essentially, in any distributed authorization protocol, credentials should mention their purpose beside their powers. For this information to be meaningful we should link it to the functional requirements of the original application. We sketch how one can modify a requirement engineering methodology to incorporate security concerns so that we explicitly trace back the high-level goals for which a functionality has been delegated by a (human or software) agent to another one. Then one could be directly derive purpose-based trust management solutions from the requirements. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.