Chair of Mobile Business & Multilateral Security

Privacy and Identity Management in Europe for Life (PrimeLife)

Abstract

This raises substantial new privacy challenges: A first technical challenge is how to protect privacy in emerging Internet applications primelife logosuch as collaborative scenarios and virtual communities. A second challenge is how to maintain life-long privacy. PrimeLife will ensure that the community at large adopts privacy technologies.

Individuals in the Information Society want to protect their autonomy and retain control over personal information, irrespective of their activities. Information technologies hardly consider those requirements, thereby putting the privacy of the citizen at risk. Today, the increasingly collaborative character of the Internet enables anyone to compose services and to contribute and distribute information. Individuals will contribute throughout their life leaving a life-long trail of personal data. 

 

Start: 01-03-2008
Completion: 31-10-2011
Type: EU Research Project
Website: http://primelife.ercim.eu/
 
Objective

Start:

2008-03-01

Completion:

2011-10-31

In their daily interaction over the Internet, individuals contribute throughout their life leaving a life-long trail of personal data. Technological advances facilitate extensive data collection, unlimited storage and reuse of the individual's digital interactions. Today, individuals cannot protect their autonomy and cannot retain control over personal information, irrespective of their activities, as present information technologies hardly consider these requirements. This raises substantial new privacy challenges: how to protect privacy in emerging Internet applications such as collaborative scenarios and virtual communities; and how to maintain life-long privacy.

PrimeLife will address the core privacy and trust issues pertaining to the aforementioned challenges. Its long-term vision is to counter the trend to life-long personal data trails without compromising on functionality. It will build upon and expand the FP6 project Prime that has shown how privacy technologies can enable citizens to execute their legal rights to control personal information in on-line transactions. The main objective of the project is to bring sustainable privacy and identity management to future networks and services:

  • Fundamentally understand privacy-enhancing identity management ‘for life' (practical life, throughout life & beyond)
  • Bring Privacy to the Web and its Applications
  • Develop and make tools for privacy-friendly identity management widely available -privacy live

Resolving these issues requires substantial progress in many underlying technologies. PrimeLife will substantially advance the state of the art in the areas of human computer interfaces, configurable policy languages, web service federations, infrastructures and privacy-enhancing cryptography. It will also ensure that the community at large adopts the results of the project by working with the relevant Open Source communities, standardisation bodies and relevant partner's projects. It will further organise workshops to transfer technologies and concepts.

Team