Towards a Collective Awareness Platform for Privacy Concerns and Expectations

Abstract

In an increasingly instrumented and inter-connected digital world, citizens generate vast amounts of data, much of it being valuable and a significant part of it being personal. However, controlling who can collect it, limiting what they can do with it, and determining how best to protect it, remain deeply undecided issues. This paper proposes CAPrice, a socio-technical solution based on collective awareness and informed consent, whereby data collection and use by digital products are driven by the expectations and needs of the consumers themselves, through a collaborative participatory process and the configuration of collective privacy norms. The proposed solution relies on a new innovation model that complements existing top-down approaches to data protection, which mainly rely on technical or legal provisions. Ultimately, the CAPrice ecosystem will strengthen the trust bond between service developers and users, encouraging innovation and empowering the individuals to promote their privacy expectations as a quantifiable, community-generated request.