With the rapid accumulation and processing of personal data by numerous organizations, it is of paramount importance to protect people from adverse uses of their data, while allowing them to enjoy the benefits the use of these data can possibly provide. This is the question of protecting citizens’ privacy, while enabling them to make informed decisions regarding their actions with privacy implications. The PRIVACY.US innovative training network will train thirteen creative, entrepreneurial and innovative early stage researchers (ESRs) to be able to reason, design and develop innovative solutions to questions related to the protection of citizens’ privacy, considering the multidisciplinary and intersectoral aspects of the issue. ESRs will be trained to face both current and future challenges in the area of privacy and usability. PRIVACY.US offers a combination of research-related and transferable competence skills that will enhance the career perspectives of the ESRs in both the academic and non-academic sectors. The consortium consists of five universities and five non-academic organizations. This deliberate and balanced construction will ensure that the project outcomes and impacts are maximal with respect to the call criteria and the EU policy areas regarding data security and privacy. The market potential for the generated knowledge is also a key element of this proposal. The consortium industrial partners are three SMEs, one large enterprise, and a data-protection authority. The ESRs will receive comprehensive training and engage in intersectoral collaboration. Through this collaborative effort, the project will make a significant contribution and impact to the ESRs future careers. It will also contribute to shaping future privacy policies and practices in Europe and will significantly advance the state of the art in privacy and usability research.

The SPECIAL project will address the contradiction between Big Data innovation and privacy-aware data protection by proposing a technical solution that makes both of these goals realistic. We will develop technology that: (i) supports the acquisition of user consent at collection time and the recording of both data and metadata (consent, policies, event data, context) according to legislative and user-specified policies; (ii) caters for privacy-aware, secure workflows that include usage/access control, transparency and compliance verification; (iii) demonstrates robustness in terms of performance, scalability and security all of which are necessary to support privacy preserving innovation in Big Data environments; and (iv) provides a dashboard with feedback and control features that make privacy in Big Data comprehensible and manageable for data subjects, controllers, and processors. SPECIAL shall allow citizens and organisations to share more data, while guaranteeing data protection compliance, thus enabling both trust and the creation of valuable new insights from shared data. Our vision will be realised and validated via real world use cases that - in order to be viable - need to overcome current challenges concerning the processing and sharing of data in a privacy preserving manner. In order to realise this vision, we will combine and significantly extend big data architectures to handle Linked Data, harness them with sticky policies as well as scalable queryable encryption, and develop advanced user interaction and control features: SPECIAL will build on top of the Big Data Europe and PrimeLife Projects, exploit their results, and further advance the state of the art of privacy enhancing technologies.

The growing complexity of the digital ecosystem in combination with increasing global risks entail the danger that enforcing cybersecurity may bypass other fundamental values like equality, fairness or privacy, whereas downplaying cybersecurity would undermine citizens’ trust and confidence in the digital infrastructure. Technology developers as well as legal and philosophical scholars and empirical researchers have dealt for many years with cybersecurity issues, although from very specific angles. What is missing is community-building that unifies these perspectives from the presupposition that technology development in cybersecurity should incorporate European values and fundamental rights. Constructing this community – an alliance for value-driven cybersecurity – is the central aim of the CANVAS consortium. CANVAS consists of partners from different scientific traditions – ethical, legal, empirical and technological – with unique competences and broad contact networks such that they can serve as “seed crystals” for community-building. The consortium will take three domains of application with unique value-profiles and complementing cybersecurity exigencies – the health system, finance, and police / national security – as starting point for outlining problems related to value-driven cybersecurity. Using a three-step process, CANVAS will (1) structure existing knowledge, (2) design a network for exchanging knowledge and generating insights across domains, and (3) disseminate the insights gained through three means: A reference curriculum for value-driven cybersecurity with a focus on industry-training, briefing packages for policy stakeholders, and a MOOC (massive open online course) on value-driven cybersecurity. Furthermore, the alliance that should result from this community-building will allow for self-organization among alliance members for tackle specific research questions that emerge out of knowledge exchange in future proposals.

Changes in the regulation of ICT research and innovation are opening up a new scenario. It is expected that stakeholders, policy makers, and end users adapt to them as soon as possible. This, however, might be hard, especially for SMEs. PANELFIT is firmly committed to facilitating this adaptation process by producing a set of editable, open access Guidelines, validated by two data protection agencies. Once produced, they will serve as operational standards able to reduce the ethical and legal issues posed by ICT technologies while promoting innovation and market growth, enabling high-quality job creation and ensuring an adequate level of privacy and security/cybersecurity. Furthermore, we will produce a complementary set of six outcomes to 1) suggest possible concrete improvements to the current regulatory and governance framework, both at the EU and the national level, 2) create mutual learning and support tools and to promote networking among stakeholders and policy makers and 3) increase the quantity and quality of the information available to policy makers, professionals, researchers, journalists and the public. All these outcomes will be produced by a co-creation process involving policy makers, stakeholders, and end-users. They will all participate in the creation of the main outcomes of the project through a range of engagement activities that includes workshops, public consultations, encounters, surveys, etc. This will be combined with a strong communication and dissemination strategy that includes numerous activities, such as webinars, MOOC courses, public debates, a constant use of a web site and social networks and the creation of a Platform for Mutual Learning, which is meant to become the reference forum for the discussion of the issues at stake even after the end of the project. The participation in PANELFIT of the European Data Journalism Network, with an aggregated web audience of almost 70 million monthly visits will help us reach this aim.