Northeastern University has been running ReCon project with the target of identifying which mobile apps are leaking Personal Information, which type of information it’s leaked and what are the destinations of that info. We want you to create different tools that leverage the insights discovered by this project.

Thanks to a Princeton project named Privacy Census, we can now understand how extended are tracking techniques over the web, including advanced ones such as fingerprinting. However, this information might be difficult to process and understand for the average user. We are looking for ways to communicate this appropriately to end-users so they can understand what are those techniques, how are they used and how do they affect them.

Facebook Data Valuation Tool is a Browser plugin that has been developed by Carlos III University. The plugin shows end-user an estimation of the value they are generating to Facebook based on her browsing activity (i.e. the ads she watches and clicks on).

During the last year, people have started to be aware of the importance of personal data for Internet companies. However, it’s not clear how much value do they have for those companies. We thinks users would love a way to calculate how much they are worth, taking into account the type of data, the specific data and the potential number of similar users.

Many people unknowingly volunteer sensitive personal information and fail to restrict access to it. This kind of information is analytically valuable to both data brokers and exploitation value to attackers. The idea is raising awareness of the potential danger it has for users.

Tracking mechanisms often can’t separate child and adult activity, putting children at risk for targeted advertising and analytics. Younger generations also tend to have a much larger “digital footprint”, often increasing their risk of identity theft and cyberstalking. There’s no technical “silver bullet” for these complex issues, so educating parents and children is key to improving their cyber safety.

Average user don’t usually understand what is really going on when they browse a Web Site or when they use an application in their smartphone. Every time they do such a simple action, many third parties are involved, and in most of the situations, all of them try to track them.

Targeted advertising has been the focus of much research effort, mostly dedicated to optimizing the strategies for targeting users. As a consequence, it has increased online advertising revenues significantly. However, it has also been raising more and more concerns from users, who often feel that it constitutes an invasion of their privacy. In particular, users often wonder “why am I being shown this ad?” or similar questions. EURECOM Institute and MPI-SWS, have been conducting an study on how to provide answers to such questions, in a privacy sensitive way. To this extent the following following would be useful: