The ever-growing levels of complexity of modern information systems complicate the traceability of processed and stored personal data. The individual citizen is at the mercy of the systems. Data protection law tries to counteract this. Transparency - the right to know who knows what, when, and on which occasion about oneself - is a fundamental right of the German constitution. The right to information is one instrument of data protection to establish transparency. Since there still is a lack of functionality in regards to transparency, the person concerned usually merely receives a static database snapshot. Obtaining no meaningful information about collection, transfer, and other flows of personal data. Recent research efforts evolve around automated tracking mechanisms for personal data. All information required can be derived from the resulting personal data provenance. This information must be visualized comprehensible for the person concerned. However, this objective has not yet been fully achieved. The data protection requirements for an electronic response to an information request have not yet been systematically considered. The data structure of personal data provenance is unclear. Its configurable, distributed collection and its aggregation at the time of an information request prove to be research gaps. It is an established fact that the right to information and other rights of the person concerned have not yet been technically interwined. The resulting tracking data raises new issues of data protection law itself. They allow extensive profiling which has not been addressed. In the work at hand the right to information is critically assessed with a focus on the notion of transparency. Furthermore, the technical requirements to exercise the right to information are created. The contributions of this work are as follows: (1) The implementation of the right to information in constitutional and legal structures of data protection is examined. The relevance of the right to information is evaluated. The challenges arising from the adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation, especially the right to data portability, are inspected. Data protection requirements for an automated response to information requests are systematically derived using a structured approach. (2) A distributed, data-centric, integrated and user-focused data protection information system is designed and implemented. It allows layer-independent, semantic-configurable provenance tracking across system boundaries. Combined with usage control, further data protection rights such as the right to erasure can be enforced. The implemented privacy dashboard allows the interactive and gradual exercise of the right to information. (3) Profiling risks are visualized by means of a generic, instantiable and calculable metric for unlinkability, the impossibility to interrelate personal data. Existing concepts for information-theoretic unlinkability metrics are generalized to arbitrary linkage relations. The schema is instantiated for four relations related to the data protection information system. A priori and a posteriori knowledge of an attacker is formalized and integrated into the metric. This metric is proposed as the basis for an informed decision of the person concerned regarding the provenance tracking. The plausibility of the approach is demonstrated by means of a continuous example. In addition, the scalability of the data protection information system is evaluated. The results show that a precise data collection and a good memory scalability go hand in hand. A heuristic calculation is performed for the unlinkability metric. The accuracy depends on the threshold value of the termination criterion. Finally, user acceptance of the privacy dashboard is verified by a study. The developed platform platform turns out to be superior to existing visualizations.
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The ever-growing levels of complexity of modern information systems complicate the traceability of processed and stored personal data. The individual citizen is at the mercy of the systems. Data protection law tries to counteract this. Transparency - the right to know who knows what, when, and on which occasion about oneself - is a fundamental right of the German constitution. The right to information is one instrument of data protection to establish transparency. Since there still is a lack of...
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