PRIMELIFE

Individuals in the Information Society want to protect their autonomy and retain control over personal information, irrespective of their activities. Information technologies hardly consider those requirements, thereby putting the privacy of the citizen at risk. Today, the increasingly collaborative character of the Internet enables anyone to compose service and contribute and distribute information. Individuals will contribute throughout their life leaving a life-long trail of personal data.

This raises substantial new privacy challenges: A first technical challenge is how to protect privacy in emerging Internet applications such as collaborative scenarios and virtual communities. A second challenge is how to maintain life-long privacy. PrimeLife will resolve the core privacy and trust issues pertaining to these challenges. Its long-term vision is to counter the trend to life-long personal data trails data without compromising on functionality. We will build upon and expand the sound foundation of the FP6 project PRIME that has shown how privacy technologies can enable citizens to execute their legal rights to control personal information in on-line transactions. Resolving these issues requires substantial progress in many underlying technologies. PrimeLife will substantially advance the state of the art in the areas of human computer interfaces, configurable policy languages, web service federations, infrastructures and privacy-enhancing cryptography.

PrimeLife will ensure that the community at large adopts privacy technologies. To this effect PrimeLife will work with the relevant Open Source communities and standardisation bodies, and partner projects. It will further organise workshops with interested parties such as partner projects to transfer technologies and concepts. This will also validate the project's results on a large scale. European industry will be strengthened by providing building blocks for trustworthy treatment of customers' data.