New Research Project: Privacy Value Networks
I spotted this on the Oxford Internet Institute Newsletter, which may be of interest to those looking at privacy and identity.
3. New Research Project: Privacy Value Networks
————————————————–The OII is to lead the £2m Privacy Value Networks project: one of three awarded funding under the Technology Strategy Board’s ‘Ensuring Privacy and Consent’ research programme. It will investigate the way the public thinks about privacy and how organisations can model the costs and benefits of processing personal information.
Project website: http://www.pvnets.org/
Project PI Dr Ian Brown, said: “Privacy has become a major issue in the UK, with worries about the development of a surveillance society. We are delighted to have this opportunity to carry out research that will ensure businesses and government agencies fully understand privacy concerns, and can provide effective and efficient services that properly deal with them.”
The project will look at privacy in a range of contexts. These include creating a sensor-enhanced Facebook to help understand how students might share or restrict automatically gathered information such as their location, current companions and activity. Researchers will also investigate how families share this type of information using a new mobile phone application, and how it might be used to improve the lives of children and the elderly while protecting their privacy and autonomy.
The project will look at the government’s own use of sensitive personal information in the Identity and Passport Service, and how it is interpreted by staff and passport applicants. It will also work with financial institutions to design privacy-friendly services that reduce the financial exclusion of those with limited or damaged credit histories.
Given it is sponsored by the TSB, who are doing quite significant projects in this area then I think it is is one to watch over the next few months. I feel it has some interesting tie-ins with projects such as FLAME and is going to provide useful input into the future work that JISC are looking to do on identity.
Grant 10/08: Project to Develop an Identity Toolkit
This all sounds a little complex from the title above but I’m really looking forward to some good responses on this grant (started off as a call but has now moved into our new money issuing process so has a different name). More details can be found here.
For those with quite long memories the background to this was to take up a recommendation from the Identity Project and provide funding for the development of an identity toolkit that would help universities and colleges with putting in an identity infrastructure. It’s work that has been done at some institutions already so people like Cardiff, for example, have done a good deal of work in this area. However, what this grant aims to do is to bring together that good experience and provide it all in one place so that everyone can use it either a little or a lot, dependent on where they are in the cycle of managing identity.
We’re hoping this is going to be a very useful piece of work as more and more institutions are joining the federation and having to address the subject of identity management as part of moving to using the federation to control access to resources. Whilst it is not going to be a panacea it should form an important part of the future work on identity and access management that is going to go ahead over the next few years.