PECS

People’s privacy control over the personal data that they generate and consume while they drive modern cars is extremely weak at present. There is historical as well as recent evidence that car brands harvest a variety of personal data from drivers and, arguably, full compliance of their processing with the European General Data Protection Regulation is questionable.

PECS revolutionises modern car ecosystems for what concerns the processing of personal data. It does so by advancing, tailoring to the specific domain and, ultimately, combining together both soft and hard privacy measures. The project raises drivers’ soft privacy through the PECS interface for static and dynamic control of personal data, so that drivers can decide what to share and with whom and when, as well as follow and control the flows of data at service run time by means of multy-sensory media techniques. Hard privacy thrives in the project through a combination of obfuscation techniques including Federated Analytics, Secure Multi Party Computation and Pseudonymisation, so that drivers are enabled to keep their personal data opaque to anyone from the outset. All developments proceed from the established academic laboratories of UNICT-UNIMORE, then are demonstrated in the operational environment of MASA-UNIMORE, reaching TRL7.

The PECS results stem from the open-source, open-Internet approaches, hence bear huge technical, societal and industrial impacts, bringing Europe at the forefront of data protection, at least in the automotive domain. PECS also brings forward a whole new range of business opportunities such as various forms of software support for its technologies, and of renewed car services leveraging privacy-by-design-by-default.

Finally, PECS provides the necessary grounds favouring the inception of a new breed of services that would be naturally enrooted on drivers’ sensitive data such as sexual, religious and political orientations, e.g. apps for dating, praying and debate on political topics.