Mission 2

Minimise harms while maximising benefits from a sharing-driven digital economy

REPHRAIN will redress citizens’ rights in transactions in the data-driven economic model by transforming the narrative from privacy as confidentiality only to also include agency, control, transparency, and ethical and social values. This will enable a more sophisticated assessment of data use (and potential misuse) leading to new types of PETs and mechanisms to build these into the infrastructure for seamless integration of privacy and harm reduction measures into applications (similar to developer-centred security).

Mission 2 co-leads: Steven Murdoch, José Such

 

  • Novel tools and solutions for more transparent and self-explainable data ecosystems

While confidentiality is important to achieve privacy, it is not enough – privacy is also context-dependent and a known boundary regulation and informational self-determination mechanism. REPHRAIN will develop new approaches that provide evidence of ethical/responsible use of technologies, the data they create, and costs/benefits of new privacy-preservation techniques for both citizens and businesses.

  • Embedding Privacy (through PETs) into infrastructures

PETs solutions are often bespoke; implementation in other use cases is difficult to orchestrate. Furthermore, developers of applications that could benefit from PETs often lack privacy know-how or technical skills in PETs. REPHRAIN will develop approaches to introduce PETs at the infrastructure level—making it easier for developers to [5,6] incorporate PETs functionality in a way that is both appropriate and friction-free.

  • New PETs and (re)setting expectations of existing ones

PETs are often deployed reactively (in response to emergent privacy threats) and their capabilities and limitations are hard to explain to lay persons and experts alike. REPHRAIN will develop sound and scalable approaches that enable new applications (e.g., information sharing in a crisis) and empirically-grounded evidence on the real capabilities/limitations of (new and existing) PETs. This, in turn, will lead to new evaluation standards, fostering PETs’ adoption into domains with strong regulatory privacy requirements.