Nowadays, the use of smartphones, smart devices, mobile apps, as well as online desktop apps, has become a commodity. All online apps and products ask the user to authorize the terms and conditions. Almost all of us grant authorization without reading those lengthy and complex legal documents. This way, we are unaware of the processing we authorize the companies and other third parties to make to our personal data, which often are driven by tracking and advertising purposes.
Setting as main goal a human-centric data protection approach for regulating the use of online apps and products, the Institute of Computer Science of FORTH is leading the CAPrice Community initiative.
The Community’s principal objective is to create a community and a crowdsourcing platform to:
In the context of the research project CAP-A, the CAPrice Community developed the tools CAP-A portal and CAP-A android app, to help users conceptualize privacy policies, so that they can be described in a concrete and uniform way.
Such a conceptualization has many benefits. It enables privacy policies to be expressed using certain common terms, enhancing therefore their understandability. Furthermore, it helps present these documents in a much more compact form that assists users to quickly review and accept or reject them. Moreover, the CAP-A tools provide the means for users and producers/developers of a digital product to engage in debates, to share their thoughts about the personal preferences of the data they want to share, or to better understand the regulations that are described in the legal document, in general.
To this end, the CAP-A portal is a communication platform that helps users make explicit their personal preferences regarding privacy (i.e., the personal information they wish to share with others), and enhances their experience in using new products; on the developers’ side, it offers smart app vendors the ability to assess how close their privacy policy is to what users would expect, helping them translate the potential distance into a market opportunity.
Apart from the CAP-A portal and the CAP-A android app, the CAPrice Community developed the following additional tools:
The CAP-A project is developed by the Information Systems Laboratory (ISL) of the the Institute of Computer Science of FORTH and the company IN2. CAPrice Community and PRAXI Network/FORTH actively support the CAP-A project. The Bora company, the open developers community DevStaff, the non-lucrative organisation HomoDigitalis and the Hellenic Centre of Safe Internet through its website saferinternet4kids.gr, are the project’s external partners.
The CAP-A project is funded by NGI-Trust and the European Commission.
Help us to build an active community that will “rate” everyday products from a privacy-respecting perspective. Everybody can play a decisive role in making this effort a success.
Visit the CAP-A project website: https://www.cap-a.eu
Visit the CAP-A portal to become a member of the privacy policy testers: https://www.cap-a.eu/portal
Download the CAP-A app through play store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.in2.cap_a
Follow us on social media (#CapriceCommunity):
Further information:
Chrysakis Ioannis – Information Systems Laboratory / Institute of Computer Science / FORTH Tel.:2811391635 Email: hrysakis@ics.forth.gr
Makridaki Maria – PRAXI Network / FORTH Tel.:2810391966 Email: makridaki@praxinetwork.gr
