Privacy Flag is a European Research project combining technological and legal expertise. It develops a crowdsourcing-based solution enabling end-users to better protect their privacy.
Main goals of the project:
Privacy Flag is developing a highly scalable privacy monitoring and protection solution with:

• Crowdsourcing mechanisms to identify, monitor and assess privacy-related risks;
• Privacy monitoring agents to identify suspicious activities and applications;
• Universal Privacy Risk Area Assessment Tool and methodology tailored on European norms on personal data protection;
• Personal Data Valuation mechanism;
• Privacy enablers against traffic monitoring and finger printing;
• User friendly interface informing on the privacy risks when using an application or website.

Privacy Flag is building a global knowledge database of identified privacy risks, together with online services to support companies and other stakeholders in becoming privacy-friendly, including:

• In-depth privacy risk analytical tool and services;
• Voluntary legally binding mechanism for companies located outside Europe to align with and abide to European standards in terms of personal data protection;
• Services for companies interested in being privacy friendly;
• Researching the potential for standardization, labelling and certification.

Privacy Flag will work in close interaction with standardization bodies and will actively disseminate towards the public and specialized communities, such as ICT lawyers, policy makers and academics.

Objectives and Vision
The Privacy Flag project will research and combine the potential of crowdsourcing, ICT technologies and legal expertise to protect citizens’ privacy when visiting websites, using smartphone applications, or living in a smart city. It will enable citizens to monitor and control their privacy with a user friendly solution made available as a smart phone application, a web browser add-on, and a public website, all connected to a shared knowledge database. It will benefit from the outcomes of over several related research projects, in order to provide a new paradigm of privacy protection combining “endo-protection” with locally deployed privacy enablers protecting the citizens privacy from unwanted external access to their data, and “exo-protection” with a distributed and crowd-sourced monitoring framework able to provide a collective protection framework together with increased citizen awareness and implicit pressures on companies to improve their privacy compliance.

Project related publications

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