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27. March, 2008

Privacy and Identity Management
for Future Networks and Services –
New European research project launched

Individuals in the Information Society want to protect their autonomy and retain control over personal information, irrespective of their activities. Information technologies hardly consider these 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. Throughout their life with all its different facets, individuals will leave a trail of personal data. This enables various drawbacks for citizens and forms of unforeseen data use not endorsed by the citizens concerned. Employers access applicants’ online community profiles before inviting them to a job interview. Social networks in different countries have used details of customer’s online shopping habits or personal preferences without their permission.  Such incidents raise substantial new privacy challenges:

1. how to protect privacy in emerging Internet applications such as collaborative scenarios and virtual communities
2. how to maintain life-long control over one’s private sphere.

These challenges are addressed in “PrimeLife – Privacy and Identity Management in Europe for Life”, a 3-year project, funded with 10 Million Euro within the EU 7th Framework Programme, which started on March 1, 2008. Its objective is to bring sustainable privacy and identity management to future networks and services.

A first short-term goal of PrimeLife is to provide scalable and configurable privacy and identity management in new and emerging Internet services and applications such as virtual communities and Web 2.0 collaborative applications.
A second longer-term goal of PrimeLife is to protect the privacy of individuals over their whole span of life. Each individual leaves a multitude of traces during a lifetime of digital interactions. Technological advancements facilitate extensive data collection, unlimited storage, as well as reuse and life-long linkage of these digital traces.

PrimeLife will empower individuals to solve the core privacy and trust issues pertaining to these challenges. Its long-term vision is to counter the trend to life-long personal data trails without compromising on functionality.

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 (HCI), configurable policy languages, web service federations, infrastructures and privacy-enhancing cryptography.

Several PrimeLife partners are participating in industry and standardisation groups such as the World Wide Web Consortium’s PLING, Liberty Alliance, ISO/IEC JTC 1, and ITU. Furthermore, PrimeLife will work and interact with relevant Open Source communities and research projects in order to achieve sustainability of project results.

PrimeLife is a follow-up project to the FP6 project PRIME - Privacy and Identity Management for Europe. PRIME will hold its Closing Event on July 21 at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, in conjunction with the 8th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium.