Foundations of Privacy - Yet Another Idea

Talking with a colleague about yesterday's post on "a" foundation for privacy, or privacy engineering, he complained that the model wasn't complete. Of course the structuring is just one possible manifestation and others can be put together to take into consideration other views, or to provide a semantics of privacy in differing domains. For example, complete with semantic gaps, we might have a model which presents privacy law and policies in terms of economic theory which in turn is grounded in mathematics:

Then place the two models side-by-side and "carve" along the various tools, structures, theories etc that each uses and note the commonalities and differences, and then try to reconcile those.

The real challenge here is to decompose each of those areas into those theories, tools etc that are required to properly express each level. Then for each of those areas such as listed earlier,eg: type theory, programming, data flow, entropy etc, map each of these together. For example, a privacy policy might talk about anonymity and in turn anonymity of a data set can be given a semantics in terms of entropy.

Actually this is where the real details are embedded and we the levels as we have depicted them are vague, fuzzy classifications for convenience of grouping  these together.