An Initial Analysis on the Impact of Software Transparency and Privacy on a Healthcare Environment

Transparency and privacy are two fundamental parts of any democratic society. Although both transparency and privacy are essential in todays environment they are often conflicting. Allowing more transparency is likely to impact privacy, likewise, preserving privacy often reduces transparency. With consistently evolving nature of information technology and a tremendous amount of data being generated on a daily basis, there is a growing need to balance privacy and transparency in order to exist in the fast paced environment. The purpose of this work is to understand the current state of software transparency and privacy as well as how it is being perceived in the workplace. This thesis focuses on the following three objectives. First, it supports the development of the catalogues documenting all existing privacy concerns and how they relate to transparency. Second, it narrows down its focus to a healthcare domain. Lastly, it evaluates current state of software transparency in existing health information systems.