PAPAYA: Platform for PrivAcY preserving data Analytics

One of the key motivations for organisations to adopt analytics technologies and applications is the valuable insights that can be inferred from the data generated and collected and the impact that this data has on businesses. With the imminent arrival of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), companies are coerced to adopt privacy-enhancing technologies that, on the one hand, protect data to ensure their clients’ privacy and on the other hand, allow their processing while keeping them meaningful, useful, and protected at the same time.

Technology and legislation do not always progress at the same speed. The GDPR has brought a set of new challenges to companies that collect/process personal data. Moreover, data outsourcing has become a critical need for most Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) in order to access cutting edge solutions without having to rely on a complex in-house infrastructure.

The PAPAYA project aims at developing an integrated platform regrouping several new Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) that will (i) help to perform analytics over protected data (these will be the result of the combination of machine learning algorithms with data privacy solutions) (ii) enable data subjects to assess risks and exercise control over their data when possible. PAPAYA will hopefully bring these primitives to the industry and make them available through an integrated platform.

The main analytics operations that PAPAYA focuses on are:

• privacy-preserving Neural Network (NN) classification
• privacy-preserving collaborative training with NN
• privacy- preserving clustering
• privacy-preserving counting

How can the PAPAYA project make a difference to potential end-users?

PAPAYA considers two groups of end-users:

• businesses/companies that will perform some analytics over data
• data subjects whose data are actually processed.

Thanks to PAPAYA's privacy preserving data analytics tools and GDPR compliance tools, businesses will improve their management and use of personal/sensitive data. Consequently, data subjects will be empowered by respecting their privacy wishes and increasing transparency over how their data is processed. Thanks to the increase of trust of users in online services, users will be willing to share more data rendering this analyzed data more accurate hence increasing the utility of the services.

How will your goals & results support and influence investments that can be made in the future Horizon Europe?

The outcome of the project will have a substantial impact on companies that are preparing their compliance with the GDPR. Because of the financial sanctions that can be issued with this new regulation, organisations will be motivated to incorporate privacy into their business cores.  The PAPAYA platform can help these organisations analyse data for their business decision making while applying the appropriate safeguards to protect users' privacy. Consequently, PAPAYA's results will increase the trust in the digital single market and allow European companies to be equipped with advanced privacy enhancing technologies in order to lead in the worldwide ecosystem of privacy-aware services.

Find out more on what is next on the GDPR at the cyberwatchingeu #Concertation19 on June 4, in Brussels, together with the GDPR Cluster projects. Register now!

More information about the Papaya Project, visit their website (https://www.papaya-project.eu/) and social media channels @ProjectPapaya and in/PAPAYAproject.

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