Researchers from MIT have developed a system that allows programmers to build privacy rules into their applications. The system, called Jeeves, is a programming language that builds privacy policies into an application that are then enforced throughout the lifetime and workflow of the application. In other words, Jeeves helps ensure that when the programmer adds new functionality, such as photo tags, it is not possible for a program to publish tags outside existing privacy settings. The goal of the research, which led to Jeeves, has been to develop a language design approach. There is an open-source Python version of Jeeves released in January. It is a Python library that runs like Jeeves and includes a macro that programmers can make use of to rewrite the code so that it operates based on Jeeves’ semantics, propagating policies, and views of sensitive values.
Source: MIT
