A conceptual framework for configurable privacy-awareness in a citizen-centric eGovernment

Governments are looking for ways to exploit the advances in ICT to transform the public sector in terms of effective governance, transparency, citizen participation, and policymaking. The eGovernment implementation is faced with challenges, which are administrative, societal, technological, and legal concerns, to just name a few. One important challenge is that the citizens must be able to trust the eGovernment during electronic transactions. This entails that the information communicated between the public and the government is not only protected against security attacks, but is also protected against privacy threats. Privacy protection must be integrated in the eGovernment platform to ensure an acceptable level of trust among all participating parties. This paper presents a conceptual framework of a configurable privacy-awareness system that supports citizen participation whenever government officials access personal data.