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Security and Privacy Requirements for Electronic Consent: A Systematic Literature Review

Published: 22 March 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Electronic consent (e-consent) has the potential to solve many paper-based consent approaches. Existing approaches, however, face challenges regarding privacy and security. This literature review aims to provide an overview of privacy and security challenges and requirements proposed by papers discussing e-consent implementations, as well as the manner in which state-of-the-art solutions address them. We conducted a systematic literature search using ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, and PubMed Central. We included papers providing comprehensive discussions of one or more technical aspects of e-consent systems. Thirty-one papers met our inclusion criteria. Two distinct topics were identified, the first being discussions of e-consent representations and the second being implementations of e-consent in data sharing systems. The main challenge for e-consent representations is gathering the requirements for a “valid” consent. For the implementation papers, many provided some requirements but none provided a comprehensive overview. Blockchain is identified as a solution to transparency and trust issues in traditional client-server systems, but several challenges hinder it from being applied in practice. E-consent has the potential to grant data subjects control over their data. However, there is no agreed-upon set of security and privacy requirements that must be addressed by an e-consent platform. Therefore, security- and privacy-by-design techniques should be an essential part of the development lifecycle for such a platform.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare
ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare  Volume 2, Issue 2
April 2021
226 pages
EISSN:2637-8051
DOI:10.1145/3446675
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 22 March 2021
Accepted: 01 November 2020
Revised: 01 September 2020
Received: 01 April 2020
Published in HEALTH Volume 2, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Systematic literature review
  2. e-consent
  3. electronic consent
  4. privacy-by-design
  5. security-by-design

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  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed

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  • KU Leuven C2-ePIC project

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  • (2023)Informing a European guidance framework on electronic informed consent in clinical research: a qualitative studyBMC Health Services Research10.1186/s12913-023-09173-523:1Online publication date: 21-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Electronic consent in clinical care: an international scoping reviewBMJ Health & Care Informatics Online10.1136/bmjhci-2022-10072630:1(e100726)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2023
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  • (2022)Sovereign Digital Consent through Privacy Impact Quantification and Dynamic ConsentTechnologies10.3390/technologies1001003510:1(35)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2022
  • (2022)Rethinking informed consent in the time of COVID-19: An exploratory surveyFrontiers in Medicine10.3389/fmed.2022.9956889Online publication date: 27-Sep-2022

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