Scalable Policy-awarE linked data arChitecture for prIvacy, trAnsparency and compliance

Cyberwatching.eu is featuring SPECIAL (Scalable Policy-awarE linked data arChitecture for prIvacy, trAnsparency and compliance), one of the active cybersecurity and privacy project which explicitly delivers tangible results supporting GDPR compliance and respectful treatment of personal information.

SPECIAL is a 3-year (Jan17-Dec19) European research and innovation project funded under the Horizon2020-ICT-2016-1 Big Data PPP call to address privacy-preserving Big Data technologies. It is focused on providing a novel consent management system supporting GDPR compliance on the UI side as well as on the backend side of IT systems. This will be for the direct benefit of data subjects, as well as a business enabler for data controllers. The technology is being developed to ease the industry’s difficulties with GDPR compliance and to enable respectful treatment of personal information.

Contribution for the future Horizon Europe

SPECIAL develops several GDPR compliance-supporting technologies, such as:

• Data subject-focused consent requests and management through the recording of both data and metadata (consent, policies, event data, context) according to legal and user-specified policies;
• Privacy-aware, secure workflows with usage/access control + auditability to enhance transparency and compliance verification;
• Robustness in terms of performance, scalability and security ;
• A dashboard with feedback and control features that makes data collection and processing comprehensible and manageable for data subjects, controllers, and processors alike.

Obtaining and managing valid consent under the umbrella of the European data protection framework easier now with the developed GDPR compliance-supporting technologies of SPECIAL project. The work created, such as the ontologies and vocabularies, the code repository, the UI privacy dashboards, consent and control prototypes, has been successfully tested in the context of their industry partner’s use cases. Thus, the SPECIAL results provide a solid basis for further development for the future research and innovation. Moreover, the ontologies and vocabularies work will be continued as a standardisation program with the W3C Data Privacy Vocabularies and Controls Community Group (DPVCG).

To find out more about SPECIAL, read their dedicated page for more details: https://cyberwatching.eu/projects/989/special