There is an evidently growing legal, cultural, and technological need for tools that allow users to express their own intentions and consent over the usage of their personal data and information. Service providers and institutions that manage personal data rely on specifying monolithic “Terms and Conditions” written in natural language and enforced in an ad-hoc manner. Often, the only degree of automation is by presenting users with top-down and coarse-grained “opt-in/out” options. We develop technology for users to describe their personal contract of data usage in formal, machine-processable, and fine-grained languages. Unlike traditional computational privacy approaches, our focus is not on preserving confidentiality against an adversary, but rather on cooperating with a trusted service provider to abide by user preferences in an algorithmic way, in what we call Collaborative Privacy. Dr. Konstantinidids will present recent results on Collaborative Privacy and applications on (i) clinical trials and (ii) relational databases, (iii) and open research data (EU project RAISE), (iv) data marketplaces (EU project UPCAST).
