TRAPEZE – Transparency, Privacy and Security for European Citizens
As we witness the rise of the digital age and reap the benefits of a data-driven society, our activities, industrial processes, and research amass an unimaginable amount of data. This “Deep Web of Data” holds huge potential for the European Digital Single Market and for business, science and society. However, its growth comes at a cost to the very society that created it – it has become immensely difficult, if not impossible, to manage and, hence, keep the data safe. This struggle for traditional businesses is both impeding progress in the EU economy and has also opened the door for cybercrime. With the ever-increasing pace of data production, citizens in Europe find themselves at the mercy of those controlling the data. With increasing awareness, people are taking a more active role in the protection of their own data. While awareness-raising is key in engaging all participants in the protection of citizens’ fundamental rights, a foundation of trust is essential for strengthening society’s overall cyber-resilience. The right tools and guidelines can help to support the will of the citizens and turn the fight against data misuse and cybercrime into a joint effort. TRAPEZE is aiming to become a lighthouse for European and global initiatives that aspire to deliver citizen-first, cyber-resilient, innovation. To make this goal a reality, TRAPEZE aims to put citizens’ security and privacy into their own hands by providing them, first of all, with innovative dashboards that will enable fine-grained and dynamic control of their data protection preferences across all relevant controllers. These will be accompanied by transparency and feedback mechanisms that will allow data subjects to comprehend the complex flows of their data and actively participate in the prevention, detection, and reporting of legal noncompliance or incidents, and in exercising their legal rights. Furthermore, to ensure citizens of all groups, skills, and physical abilities can manage and monitor their data flows, TRAPEZE will place a special emphasis on usability, but also privacy preferences and sociological aspects across different Member States. This collaboration (or co-production) will enable direct involvement of the EU citizen in the development of privacy-enhancing technologies. Additionally, to contribute to the resilience of European society, we aim to increase awareness and competence through open knowledge, gamification, and micro-learning. TRAPEZE is significantly different from existing approaches in that it does not attempt to protect the citizen by abruptly reshaping the European digital economy. It seeks to empower the data subject, while enabling a realistic, steady transition to a more trustworthy data ecosystem that extends beyond online services and deep into the controllers’ data silos. TRAPEZE aims to enable privacy-aware and privacy-preserving data value chains by leveraging the concepts of linked data graphs and distributed ledgers (blockchain). Linked data will be used to control the handling of the payload data (actual personal data relating to the citizen) stored and processed by controllers’, or processors’ systems, even downstream (re-sharing from controller to controller/processor) in the data value chain. Blockchain technology will ensure compliance and decentralisation of records of processing activities, as well as immutability and non-repudiation of said records (with GDPR compliance in mind). In addition, TRAPEZE aims to secure citizens’ smart terminals and online communication through a software development kit for mobile security. TRAPEZE’s proposed architecture and tools will be developed and evaluated under real-world conditions in three pilot scenarios in government, telecommunication and IT services, and banking. All three pilots involve the processing and aggregation of large amounts of personal data from various data sources, with policies specified at different levels of granularity.
Keywords
Privacy, Security, Transparency, data, economy