PrivacyCoLab

PrivacyCoLab

What is the aim of this initiative?

Since May 2018, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires the adoption of legal practices, whose explicit and informed user consent is mandatory and privacy must be defined, thus opening the door to a new paradigm in which users have control over their data/information.

However, from a technical point of view, this raises several concerns in various application domains.

Examples of such concerns are:

• Where does the data collected by smartphones and others go?
• How long is the data stored on the apps' cloud servers?
• With whom is this data shared?
• What type and how much information can be inferred from user data?
• For what purposes?

To solve these questions, the goal of this initiative is simple: to create a collaborative laboratory of researchers, students and professors between the University of Coimbra - Portugal (UC) and Østfold University College - Norway (OU) to propose, develop and evaluate an innovative model to respond to these new privacy requirements.

Specifically, during one year of project life, it is intended to propose a new disruptive paradigm for smartphone devices.

This project aims to address several of these identified issues, such as application monitoring, retrieval of (and information about) privacy policies, consent management, among other aspects.

It is also intended to apply and evaluate the model created in a real-world environment. Specifically, in order to evaluate the functionality and usability of the proposal, it is intended to implement it in the ISABELA system (for IoT Student Advisor and Best Lifestyle Analyser), comparing in UC and OU the impact of the new privacy paradigm in a sensitive privacy scenario.