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Trust & data sovereignty on the Internet (RIA)

 

The EU has an advanced legal framework in the areas of data protection, cybersecurity and electronic identity. The objective of this topic is to deliver architectures, protocols and services to ensure that end-users can exert their rights (e.g. under the GDPR) and benefit from decentralised technological solutions that ensure that they are fully in control of their personal data on the Internet.

Proposals under this topic should develop new technologies and data governance models for increased trust, privacy and user control of personal data and identity on the internet, levering decentralised and self-sovereign identity approaches, empowering the end-users and enabling user-centric business and sustainability models. Solutions should enable the portability of personal data sets and allow the users to transfer or share such data with organisations of their choice for purposes and under conditions they decide and control (e.g. data altruism). Proposals should contribute to a trusted digital identity ecosystem that is in line with the European regulatory framework, platform-independent and user-centric and contributes to building a secure European digital identity. The purpose is to enable individuals to effectively own, manage and control their digital identity and make it their passport to the digital society.

The proposals should support open source software and open hardware design, open access to data, standardisation activities, access to testing and operational infrastructure as well as an IPR regime ensuring lasting impact and reusability of results.

This topic has a focus on internet technologies developed for end-users (including electronic identities) and builds upon open source developments by internet innovators. It complements the activities of Destination 3 topic 2021-DATA-01-01, which have a focus on European data spaces (technologies for data pooling, sharing and re-use), as well as those in Cluster 3 related to privacy and online identity management (e.g. 2021-CS-01-04, 2021-FCT-01-01, 2022-BM-01-02).

Financial support to third parties

The consortium should support third party projects from outstanding open source innovators, academic research groups, high-tech start-ups, SMEs and other multidisciplinary actors, so that multiple actors are funded and collectively contribute to increasing trust and data sovereignty on the Internet. Apps and services that innovate without a research component are not covered by this topic. As the primary purpose of the action is to support and mobilise internet innovators, a minimum of 80% of the total requested EU contribution should be allocated to financial support to third parties, selected through open calls.

The consortium should provide the programme logic for the third-party projects, ensure the coherence and coordination of these projects, and provide the necessary technical support, as well as coaching and mentoring, in order to ensure that the collection of third party projects contributes to a significant advancement and impact in the research and innovation domain, including in terms of standardisation. These tasks cannot be implemented using the budget earmarked for the financial support to third parties.

Beneficiaries should make explicit the intervention logic for the area, their capacity to attract internet talents, to deliver value-added services to the third-party projects, as well as their expertise and capacity in managing the full life-cycle of the open calls transparently and efficiently (a minimum of five open calls during the lifetime of the project). They should explore synergies with other research and innovation actions, supported at regional, national or European level, to increase the overall impact.

The Commission considers that proposals with an overall duration of typically 36 months would allow these outcomes to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other durations. For ensuring focused effort, third parties will be funded through projects typically in the EUR 50 000 to 150 000 range per project, with indicative duration of 9 to 12 months.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement.