TYPES: helping users in the current quest for privacy & data protection

The current level of sophistication that online advertising models have reached rely on a huge variety of intermediary actors and technologies to deliver highly-personalized, targeted ads. This implies that huge amounts of user data are gathered and processed behind the scenes. Often, the practices behind this are not always transparent to the consumer and both the intrusiveness and insistence of the techniques used pose concerns as to the protection of personal data.

The online advertising market grew 13.4 percent year-on-year from €16.4 billion to €18.6 billion in the first six months of 2016. A primary concern for those investing in these services is to provide adequate back up for search engines, social networks, or user-generated content sites. However, the inherent lack of transparency on tracking techniques and the information that companies collect on the individual is cause for concern among the public.

This is where TYPES come into play

Types aims to safeguard the individual’s privacy and put them in control of how their data is handled by providers for commercial or advertising purposes. Types also allows users to verify in a simple way if their online rights are adequately safeguarded and if personal data is exchanged for useful reason, and namely to deliver added-value to the end-user.

Types is a holistic framework of cutting-edge tools and technologies to ensure that both transparency and confidentiality are upheld by giving users the option as to the information they are willing to share online.

But how are users expected to know if their data and privacy are in good hands or not? Types will enable them to:

• Understand in what way their information is being used by the advertising platform;
• Configure a tailored privacy setting in order to restrict personal information to that enabled by the end-user
• Understand more fully the real value of their data.
• Easily identify any violation in the collection of information and identify the offender

How will TYPES protect user privacy?

Types has defined a series of tools to accomplish this goal:

• Proxy for privacy violation
• Data valuation tools
• Privacy preserving data broker
• Web-browser plugin to detect and protect privacy violation
• Social Media Data Valuation Tool
• Youtube video valuation tool
• Online Advertising Price Comparison Portal

The list of tools is in constant evolution and continuously updated with new additions.

Who gains to benefit from TYPES

As already outlined, end users will be the main beneficiaries of Types, as they’ll be able to adjust their privacy settings with more granularity in order to rid themselves of unwanted ads and avoid leakage of personal information. However, users won’t be the only ones to gain advantage from Types. This will have a knock-on effect on:

• Software vendors. Types will provide prompt answers to worldwide societal changes with their product portfolio by data protection solutions that deal with traffic optimization.
• Telecom Operators. Privacy-oriented services delivered via application layer proxies are likely to augment the reputation and revenues of telecom operator’s.
• “Over The Top” Service Providers (OTT SPs). The big actors (companies such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo) can win users’ trust and stand out by showing transparency on how their data is processed. By adopting Types tools, OTT-SPs can even strengthen their level of data protection compliance in a user transparent manner.

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