SFB 1223: Methods and Tools for Understanding and Controlling Privacy

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The Internet has become a global multimedia platform in which billions of users increasingly conduct sizable parts of their lives. In this context, online privacy of end-users is a largely unsolved problem. The wide circulation, easy accessibility and permanent nature of online data incurs risks ranging from public embarrassment to disadvantages when applying for jobs or insurance. New business models have emerged, tracking and monetizing personal information in an unprecedented manner. Legislators have started to respond by tightening privacy regulations, but we arguably lack the technology to fully comply with such regulations, and users lack support for making informed privacy choices. Establishing an overarching scientific foundation for providing online privacy is a long-term endeavor, requiring a fundamental research effort broadly covering two central research areas: Understanding Privacy, i.e. how to identify privacy-sensitive information in the Internet and assess the detrimental privacy consequences; and Controlling Privacy, i.e.. how to enforce user privacy demands given the dynamics of present-day digital habitats and emerging technologies. The CRC will make conceptual and tangible contributions addressing these questions, including, for example, image analysis methods that assess the potential privacy threat of public visual data, techniques protecting privacy in the presence of sophisticated mobile sensing and recording devices, and solutions preserving a user¿s anonymity in online interactions without inhibiting their functionality. Three task forces will facilitate joint research on cross-cutting themes: a comprehensive framework for data models as a basis for the interaction between different kinds of privacy analysis and enforcement; the interplay of different privacy notions; and a methodological framework to foster the usability of our solutions.Achieving our goals goes far beyond traditional security and privacy research. It requires to combinetop-down research approaches, necessary to understand privacy in an open world and on existing infrastructures; with bottom-up research approaches that are necessary to control privacy and completely reshape infrastructures in order to provide firm guarantees. It requires to tightly integrate the expertise from, and drive the long-term collaboration of, a wide range of computer science subareas ¿ including, e.g., information systems, computer vision, and social networks analysis ¿ with classical security & privacy research. The participating institutions are in a unique position to tackle this challenge. On the long run, we see a great impact on our research community: a paradigm shift towards a comprehensive, holistic approach that surmounts existing barriers between traditional privacy research and adjacent areas.