Lambda the Ultimate

It is increasingly important for applications to protect user privacy. Unfortunately, it is often non-trivial for programmers to enforce privacy policies. We have developed Jeeves to make it easier for programmers to enforce information flow policies: policies that describe who can see what information flows through a program. Jeeves allows the programmer to write policy-agnostic programs, separately implementing policies on sensitive values from other functionality. Just like Wooster's clever valet Jeeves in Wodehouse's stories, the Jeeves runtime does the hard work, automatically enforcing the policies to show the appropriate output to each viewer.

From what I gather, Jeeves takes Aspect Oriented approach to privacy. This is of course not a new idea. I presume that many of the classic problems with AOP would apply to Jeeves. Likewise, using information flow analysis for handling privacy policies is not an new idea. Combining the two, however, seems like a smart move. Putting the enforcement at the run-time level makes this sound more practical than other ideas I have heard before. Still, I personally think that specifying privacy policies at the end-user level and clarifying the concept of privacy at the normative, legal and conceptual levels are more pressing concerns. Indeed, come to think of it: I don't really recall a privacy breach that was caused by a simple information flow bug. Privacy expectations are broken on purpose by many companies and major data breaches occur when big databases are shared (recall the Netflix Prize thing). Given this, I assume the major use-case is for Apps, maybe even as a technology that someone like Apple could use to enforce the compliance of third-party Apps to their privacy policies.

I haven't looked too closely, so comments from more informed people are welcome.

Jeeves is implemented as an embedded DSL in Scala and Python.