Secure and Privacy-Preserving Information Sharing for Enhanced Resilience

Abstract

City resilience is a pressing issue worldwide since the majority of the population resides in urban areas. When disaster strikes, the consequences will be more severe in the cities. To achieve resilience, different entities and the public should share information during a disaster. ICT-based Community engagement is used for strengthening resilience. We suggest easy-to-use metrics for assessing the security and privacy of information sharing platforms for resilience, and apply them to selected platforms. Most of them are reasonably well-protected, but with less than private default settings. We discuss the importance of security and privacy for different important categories of users of such systems, to better understand how these aspects affect the willingness to share information. Security and privacy is of particular importance for whistle-blowers that may carry urgent information, while volunteers and active helpers are less affected by the level of security and privacy.