Project - CAP-A -- Digital privacy in mobile apps

CAP-A improves digital privacy awareness by crowdsourcing insights on how digital products handle user data and making terms of service easier to understand.

Financed by: Horizon 2020
Duration: 2019-2021
Keywords: Media Community Engagement

Overview

CAP-A is a project belonging to the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative that responds to the growing challenges of personal data collection in an increasingly connected digital world by introducing a socio-technical approach grounded in collective awareness and informed consent. The project enables citizens to play an active role in shaping how digital products collect, use, and protect personal data, aligning these practices with the real expectations and needs of users rather than relying solely on top-down legal or technical measures.

At the core of CAP-A is a participatory ecosystem that supports the co-creation of collective privacy norms. The project delivers a global repository of consumer- and developer-generated insights into the privacy behaviour of digital products, alongside tools that help users better understand terms of service through crowdsourcing and intuitive visual cues. By fostering collective intelligence, openness, and collaboration among all stakeholders, CAP-A strengthens trust between users and service providers while empowering individuals to express and promote their privacy expectations as shared, measurable community standards.

The objectives of the CAP-A project are threefold:

to harness the collective power of citizens towards addressing privacy-related issues associated to the use of digital products and services
to offer a suite of tools for supporting community action and for delivering a novel set of measurable metrics of community dynamics, namely social privacy norms, which can be utilized by diverse stakeholders for improving the current situation
to conduct a series of experiments under a well-defined scenario that can be adopted and further sustained by affiliated partners beyond the course of the project

In this project IN2 worked together with the Institute of Computer Science at the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas in Greece.

This project has indirectly received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the NGI_TRUST project (Grant Agreement No 825618.)