Periodic Reporting for period 2 - TYPES (Towards transparencY and Privacy in the onlinE advertising businesS)
Berichtszeitraum: 2016-05-01 bis 2017-10-31
TYPES aims to cope with this challenge by defining, implementing, and validating in pre-market status a holistic framework of technologies and tools that guarantees both transparency and privacy preservation, gives the end user control upon the amount of information he/she is willing to share, and defines privacy-by-design solutions. In particular, these tools should enable the end user:
i) to configure the privacy settings so that only the information allowed by the end-user is collected by online advertising platforms;
ii) to understand the flow of their information within the online advertising ecosystem and how it is being used;
iii) to detect episodes of information collection occurring without consent and identify the offender;
iv) to know the value of their data.
Innovation Potential:
The TYPES ecosystem can be divided in three main areas:
- Detection and safeguarding
- Data valuation
- Privacy by design solutions
To achieve this, there have been defined a clear set of demonstrators:
- Web-browser plug-in for privacy violation detection and safeguarding
- Proxy for privacy violation detection and safeguarding
- Data valuation tools
- Privacy preserving data broker
We have performed an intensive evaluation of TYPES privacy-preserving technology across the four concrete pilots based on the technological solutions implemented. The pilots have been designed and implemented into a lab environment using the Living Lab approach. This interim evaluation provided valuable feedback to the technical Work Packages and validated the release technological solutions. The final phase established the measure of the impact and commercial value of the TYPES solutions.
TYPES tools have been tested by a large set of real users, and the results obtained from these test, a final analysis of the expected short-term market impact has been done.
The final plans on exploitation and future commercialization of the various tools designed and developed within TYPES have been defined and presented with detail in D2.5. We remark that the business plans concluded are strongly linked with the testing and piloting derived from WP7.
An intensive dissemination activity has been implemented during the whole lifespan of the project that included talks in different forums: scientific, industrial, policy-makers, society, etc. In addition, some ideas developed in the TYPES project have been reported in important media – and this, of course, has been an important vehicle to bring TYPES to the society.
Consequently, from that integrated privacy preserving solutions line, the impact has been:
Social impact: Users can see their data they generate online treated at the required level of privacy and at the same time they gain increased control on their data by deciding what to share and with whom. In comparison with existing mitigation tools (“all-or-nothing” tools) that either do not control anything or eliminate tracking and ads totally, the tools implemented by TYPES let users define their privacy settings with offer higher granularity what can help them to still receive ads and offers of their interest but filtering any undesired leakage of information. Additionally, by making users aware of the economic value of their private information TYPES solutions enable users to make informed decision whether to give away their data and what level of compensation to require. These actions are targeted at making users re-gain trust online and stimulate a higher uptake of online services.
Industry impact: For Over the Top Service Providers (OTT SPs) lack of transparency and privacy is one of the main obstacles to uptake of online services. By adopting TYPES tools , OTT SPs (e.g. Google, Facebook, Yahoo) are able to differentiate themselves and gain users trust by showing transparency towards the users on how their data is treated. In this respect, the adoption of TYPES tools by OTT SPs can potentially bring them even more information to analyse since users will stop using “all-or-nothing” mitigation tools and instead use fine-grained privacy safeguarding with a controllable disclosure level that will feed that privacy preserving data broker solutions.
For Telecom operators:TYPE’s solutions will help them to cast themselves as better guardians of customer data (e.g. WIT). Privacy-oriented services delivered via application layer proxies can increase telecom operators’ reputation (and help differentiating them resulting in an increased market share) and revenues (if offered as an opt-in paid service or as a bundle into premium plans).
For European’s Commission strategy impact: An overwhelming majority of citizens says they avoid disclosing personal information online because of security concerns. The actual or perceived lack of security of digital technologies is putting at risk the European economy and society. TYPES has demonstrated technologies that can protect citizens’ assets (i.e. privacy) and thus provide prosperity through economic and societal growth.