D3.2.1 - PrimeLife Book: Privacy and Identity Management for Life Privacy and Identity Management for Life

Jan Camenisch, Simone Fischer-Hübner, Kai Rannenberg

Order here: Springer Press, ISBN: 978-3-642-20316-9

Individuals in the Information Society want to safeguard their autonomy and retain control over their personal information, irrespective of their activities. Information technologies generally do not consider those user requirements, thereby putting the privacy of the citizen at risk. At the same time, the Internet is changing from a client-server to a collaborative paradigm. Individuals are contributing throughout their life leaving a life-long trace of personal data. This raises substantial new privacy challenges.

Saving digital privacy. By 2008, the European project PRIME (Privacy and Identity Management for Europe) had demonstrated that existing privacy technologies can enable citizens to execute their legal rights to control their personal information in on-line transactions. It had raised considerable awareness amongst stakeholders and has significantly advanced the state of the art in the areas of privacy and identity management. PrimeLife has been building on the momentum created and the results achieved by PRIME to address emerging challenges in the areas of privacy and identity management and really bring privacy and identity management to live:

• A first, short-term goal of PrimeLife was to provide scalable and configurable privacy and identity management in new and emerging internet services and applications such as virtual communities and Web 2.0 collaborative applications.

• A second, longer-term goal of PrimeLife was to protect the privacy of individuals over their whole span of life. Each individual leaves a multitude of traces during a lifetime of digital interactions. Technological advancements facilitate extensive data collection, unlimited storage, as well as reuse and life-long linkage of these digital traces.

• A third goal of PrimeLife was to support privacy and identity management by progressing the state of the art on

– tools guaranteeing privacy and trust,

– the usability experience of privacy and identity management solutions,

– security and privacy policy systems, and

– privacy-enabling infrastructures.

• The last but certainly important goal of PrimeLife was to disseminate our results and enable their use in real life. We organized interdisciplinary Summer Schools of Privacy, organized and participated in standardization groups and meetings, and made the source code and documentation of most of our prototypes and implementations available for free use.

This Book. After more than three years of work in PrimeLife, this book aims at giving an overview of the results achieved. It is therefore structured into an introduction and six parts covering the most important areas of privacy and identity management considering the life of today: Several aspects of "Privacy in Life" are discussed in Part I, followed by Part II "Mechanisms for Privacy." Part III is dedicated to "Human Computer Interaction (HCI)," and Part IV to "Policy Language." Part V focuses on "Infrastructures for Privacy and Identity Management," before Part VI "Privacy Live" comes full circle describing how PrimeLife is reaching out to the life of today's and the future's netizens.