A collaborative workshop on privacy, transparency, sovereignty, and security was held on 27-28 April 2023 at the Inria Mediterranean Campus in Sophia Antipolis. The workshop was co-organized by the European projects TRAPEZE and E-CORRIDOR, and co-sponsored by Inria and ERCIM – the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics. The two-day workshop aimed to explore new ideas, share insights and collaborate on solutions that can benefit society in the fields of privacy, cybersecurity, and technology. This report presents a brief overview of the presentations and discussions held during the workshop.

Workshop participants. Photo: P. Kunz

The first day of the workshop was dedicated to research and technology. Alexander Vasylchenko from TenForce started the presentations by discussing how TRAPEZE services can enable digital privacy, security, and identity. This was followed by Fabio Martinelli’s presentation on the E-CORRIDOR approach for confidential analytics. The next presentation was by Sabrina Kirrane from the Vienna University of Economics and Business, who discussed blockchain-based resource governance for decentralized web environments. Jean-Paul Bultel from the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission-CEA presented homomorphic encryption-based similarity matching for privacy-preserving interest-based data sharing.

Ilaria Matteucci from the Italian National Research Council discussed privacy issues and the automotive sector. Simone Fischer-Hübner from Karlstad University presented a talk on usable transparency and consent, which was delivered by videoconferencing. Roland Rieke from Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft presented machine-learning methods for in-vehicle intrusion detection, with access restricted to the presentation. João P. Vilela from INESC TEC, CISUC & University of Porto talked about the prediction of user privacy preferences in mobile devices via federated learning. The last presentation of the day was by Francesco di Cerbo and Volkmar Lotz from SAP, who jointly presented on privacy research topics at SAP. The day ended with lively discussions during a wine and cheese reception.

The second day of the workshop focused on two main areas: privacy policy and regulations and the innovative utilization of privacy technologies across different sectors. The day started with a two-hour session that brought together research and Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) as well as experts from the data protection community to foster synergies and collaboration. The discussion explored the role of DPAs in promoting data protection and privacy across different sectors and jurisdictions. The session also discussed selected privacy-enhancing results of the TRAPEZE project, such as consent management through a citizen-centric privacy dashboard, policy language, and the concept of sticky consent policies.

After the DPA session, presentations were given on the challenges of trust and sovereignty awareness in global transactions, privacy and legal issues in big data, privacy-preserving passenger processing, data usage control, and protecting data and privacy in the public transport sector.

Martin Kurze (Deutsche Telekom), Ramon Martín de Pozuelo (CaixaBank), and Lauro Vanderborght (Digital Flanders) gave an overview of the TRAPEZE use cases & their impact on society. Theo Dimitrakos from Huawei and University of Kent) gave a presentation titled “Challenges of trust and sovereignty awareness for global transactions in an increasingly fragmented polarized world” via video conferencing. Rigo Wenning (ERCIM/W3C) talked about “Privacy and legal issues in Big Data.” Stefano Sebastio, from Collins Aerospace presented privacy-preserving passenger processing and operations solutions for multi-modal travels, followed by Paolo Mori (Italian National Research Council) who introduced a Data usage control procedure via video conferencing. Fabio Podda (Azienda Mobilità e Trasporti Genova) and Liivar Luts (Tallinna Transpordiamet) jointly talked about how protecting data and privacy in public transport sector in the frame of the CitySCAPE project.

Alexander Vasylchenko and Fabio Martinelli, the coordinators of the TRAPEZE and E-CORRIDOR projects respectively, concluded the workshop summarising the topics and challenges presented and questions moving forward.

More than 60 participants attended the workshop, half of them online.

See also the workshop programme with links to some presentations