Privacy Enhancing Technology Selection based on Inagaki‟s Unified Rule of Combination

A major challenge in the field of software engineering is to make users trust the software that they use in their everyday professional or recreational activities. Trusting software depends on various elements, one of which is the protection of user privacy. The paper implements a method that combines the Privacy Safeguard (PriS) method and Inagaki‟s unified combination rule. The method aims to include privacy requirements early in the system development process. The method extends the PriS method to address the degree of participation of every privacy requirements. It can be done by fuzzifiying privacy variables that maps degree of participation of each privacy variables to the [0, 1] interval. Dempster Shafer rule of combination is proposed to combine the evidences needed to select the implementation of the privacy requirement. Yagers rule of combination, which is a modified D-S rule of combination is included to handle conflicts. Inagaki‟s unified combination rule increases the filtering of evidences and also compares with the Dempster‟s rule of combination and Yager‟s rule of combination. The combination results based on the proposed approach can be more reasonable.