Fuzzy-based approach to assess and prioritize privacy risks

The new general data protection regulation requires organizations to conduct a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) when the processing of personal information may result in high risk to individual rights and freedoms. DPIA allows organizations to identify, assess and prioritize the risks related to the processing of personal information and select suitable mitigations to reduce the severity of the risks. The existing DPIA methodologies measure the severity of privacy risks according to analysts’ opinions about the likelihood and the impact factors of the threats. The assessment is therefore subjective to the expertise of the analysts. To reduce subjectivity, we propose a set of well-defined criteria that analysts can use to measure the likelihood and the impact of a privacy risk. Then, we adopt the fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making approach to systematically measure the severity of privacy risks while modeling the imprecision and vagueness inherent in linguistic assessment. Our approach is illustrated for a realistic scenario with respect to LINDDUN threat categories.