Lineage Quality Measurement

Lineage allows us to understand data flows in systems, which is important for privacy because we need to understand where our data goes in order to protect them. There are a variety of Lineage approaches, such as static & dynamic analysis; each approach has potential false positives and false negatives.

These potential false positives and false negatives impact multiple entities: the Lineage tool owners, the product team using the tool, the privacy engineers assessing the products and tools. To ensure all the entities are using and upholding a consistent standard or threshold, we will present a common framework for measuring the performance of Lineage.

With this framework, we can help:

• Product team and privacy engineers select the most effective and balanced approach for relevant privacy problems;
• Lineage tool owners focus our engineering efforts on the Lineage improvements that reduce the most risk; and
• Lineage tool owners develop new Lineage solutions and quantitatively show their efficacy.