RICERCA ITALIANA     

ANONYMOUS: computer science and legal methods for the protection of privacy and anonymity.

Università di Pisa

Abstract

This proposal, called ANONYMOUS, originates as an inter-disciplinary project on the observation that research in the area of privacy protection is currently pursued both from the legal regulation viewpoint and the information and communication technology viewpoint, and in each field there is a growing awareness that the efforts should be integrated each other. Privacy and protection of personal data is strictly intertwined with anonymity: in the contemporary trend towards increasing pervasiveness of ubiquitous technologies, the right of individuals of remaining anonymous, even if stated in laws and regulations, is jeopardized by the massive amount of digital traces left behind by everybody, in a variety of systems: telecommunication networks, both wired and wireless, bank services, commercial transactions, health services, the web, et cetera.
The main goal of this project is a quantitative, context-sensitive characterization of the notions of privacy and anonymity, together with their use in important applications, in particular: data mining and data analysis, location-based services, and trust negotiation in social networks. From the legal viewpoint, the main activity is the systematic study of the concepts of privacy and anonymity themselves, which may provide guidelines for the development of the above mentioned technologies; from the computer science viewpoint, the main >>>

Principal Investigator

Franco Turini Università degli Studi di PISA

Research Objectives

This proposal starts as a genuine interdisciplinary project from the observation that the research in the area of privacy protection is currently developed both form the legal and regulatory viewpoint, and from the computer science perspective. In both cases, the need of integrating the results of one area with the results of the other one is felt as necessary. One subject strictly related with the right to privacy and the protection of personal data is anonymity. With the strong tendency toward a greater presence and pervasiveness of information and communication technologies, and toward ubiquitous computing, the right to anonymity of individuals, when ruled by the laws, is constantly jeopardized by the amount of digital traces, left in the most diverse digital systems: in phone and mobile phone networks, in bank systems, in business transactions, in health care systems, in the web etc.
In the Italian legislation, there is no generally accepted definition of the right to anonymity and the debate about the existence itself of such a right is open. However, there are several regulations, which refer to the notion of anonymity in several specific contexts. Anonymity is also guaranteed as “the right of privacy of personal data”. Anonymity, indeed, as stated several times by the European Commission and the European Council, is the best way of protecting the privacy of data and to protect personal data of individuals. The exact definition of the meaning of anonymity >>>

First Results

RESULTS

The principal objective is the creation of a formalized channel for transferring knowledge between the juridical and computer science world in the field of privacy, anonymity and their applications in the field of data mining, location based services and trust negotiation.
A promising approach to the construction of such a channel is the definition and use of suitable ontologies, a field in which the consortium has already some experience.

From the formalization and the sharing of knowledge, the consortium expects to obtain the following results:

on the computer science side, the definition of privacy protection methods, which are compliant with juridical and the facto standards both at the national and international level in fields like:
• Analysis of mobility
• Analysis of the discriminatory use of personal attributes
• Analysis of personal data from census, health care datasets and the like.
• Models of privacy and trust in social networks
• Methods of management of privacy and trust in location based services


And, on the juridical side, a systematic analysis of the concept of anonymity with the following specific results:
• Linguistic analysis of the notion of anonymity and its framing within juridical concepts
• Analysis of national laws and jurisprudence, and the most relevant international references about anonymity and its >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

The problem of privacy protection is intertwined with the information and communication technologies, especially with the increasing pervasiveness of mobile network technologies and ubiquitous computing. The risks for privacy are on the agenda, and on the media, in contexts such as:

- data mining and the analysis of personal data,
- location-based services,
- interaction and trust negotiation in social networks.

In all these areas, the researchers and the public opinion perceive the striking conflict between new opportunities and new risks, as well as the awareness that the ubiquitous technologies will hardly find widespread social acceptance without trustable solutions. Another conviction is that these problems ought to be addressed on legal grounds, by finding proper definitions and tools for rather vague terms such as privacy, personal data and anonymity – definitions that should be applicable, hence effective in protecting human rights. As a general observation, the privacy technologies in data mining (DM), location-based services (LBS) and social networks (SN) are a subject of research since a few years, and therefore results are at an embryonic stage; moreover, the inter-disciplinary dialogue between computer scientists and jurists is lagging behind on these themes, despite their relevance.

We now provide a brief account of the state-of-the-art of research on privacy technologies in the three areas of DM, LBS >>>