Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ANR

• ANR INFRA Project: SOCIOPLUG (2013-2017) - http://socioplug.univ-nantes.fr/index.php/SocioPlug_Project

  SocioPlug is a collaborative ANR project involving Inria (ASAP and CIDRE teams), the Nantes University, and LIRIS (INSA Lyon and Université Claude Bernard Lyon). The project emerges from the observation that the features offered by the Web 2.0 or by social media do not come for free. Rather they bring the implicit cost of privacy. Users are more of less consciously selling personal data for services. SocioPlug aims to provide an alternative for this model by proposing a novel architecture for large-scale, user centric applications. Instead of concentrating information of cloud platforms owned by a few economic players, we envision services made possible by cheap low-end plug computers available in every home or workplace. This will make it possible to provide a high amount of transparency to users, who will be able to decide their own optimal balance between data sharing and privacy.

Inria Project Labs

• CAPPRIS (2012-2016)

  CAPPRIS stands for “Collaborative Action on the Protection of Privacy Rights in the Information Society”. The main objective of CAPPRIS is to tackle the privacy challenges raised by the most recent developments and usages of information technologies such as profiling, data mining, social networking, location-based services or pervasive computing by developing solutions to enhance the protection of privacy in the Information Society. To solve this generic objective, the project focuses in particular on the following fundamental issues:

  • The design of appropriate metrics to assess and quantify privacy, primarily by extending and integrating the various possible definitions existing for the generic privacy properties such as anonymity, pseudonymity, unlinkability and unobservability, as well as notions coming from information theory or databases such as the recent but promising concept of differential privacy;

  • The definition and the understanding of the fundamental principles underlying “privacy by design”, with the hope of deriving practical guidelines to implement notions such as data minimization, proportionality, purpose specification, usage limitation, data sovereignty and accountability directly in the formal specifications of our information systems;

  • The integration between the legal and social dimensions, intensely necessary since the developed privacy concepts, although they may rely on computational techniques, must be in adequacy with the applicable law (even in its heterogeneous and dynamic nature). In particular, privacy-preserving technologies cannot be considered efficient as long as they are not properly understood, accepted and trusted by the general public, an outcome which cannot be achieved by the means of a mathematical proof.

  Three major application domains have been identified as interesting experimentation fields for this work: online social networks, location-based services and electronic health record systems. Each of these three domains brings specific privacy-related issues. The aim of the collaboration is to apply the techniques developed to the application domains in a way that promotes the notion of privacy by design, instead of simply considering them as a form of privacy add-ons on the top of already existing technologies. CAPPRIS is a joint project between Inria, LAAS-CNRS, Université de Rennes I, Supélec, Université de Namur, Eurecom, and Université de Versailles.

  In addition of the scientific advances in the field of privacy, members of CAPPRIS are actively involved in the animation and federation of the French community on privacy, through the APVP workshop but also interdisciplinary colloquiums.