PICOS Project
"Privacy and Identity Management for Community Services" (PICOS) is an international research project, focused on privacy, trust and identity management aspects of mobile communities. The PICOS consortium consists of eleven partners from seven different countries. The PICOS project receives research funding from the 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7) of the EU as a part of the Trust & Security Programme.
Background
Based on the increasing popularity of online communities and additionally their usage via mobile devices, users provide and share more and more personal data with each other. Communities are used in professional and private contexts and community services support the real-world activities of their users. Against this background, the PICOS project argues, that a new approach to identity management in community services is needed, in order to meet the needs for:
* the enablement of trust, by members of the community, in other members and in the service-provision infrastructure,
- the privacy of community members’ personal information,
- the control by members of the information they share, and
- the interoperability of community-supporting services between communication service providers. This approach must be developed in an open manner, and requires technical advances in order to meet the requirements.
Approach
Therefore, PICOS will develop and build a state-of-the-art platform for providing the trust, privacy and identity management aspects of community services and applications on the Internet and in mobile communication networks. The PICOS approach to trustworthy on-line community collaboration addresses the following four questions:
- What are the Trust, Privacy and Identity issues in new context-rich mobile communication services, especially community-supporting services?
- How can information flows and privacy requirements be balanced in complex distributed service architectures (e.g., mash-ups)?
- How can these issues be solved in an acceptable, trustworthy, open, scalable, manner?
- Which supporting services and infrastructures do the stakeholders need?
The approach considers at first a review of contemporary research in relevant disciplines. Work will then focus on platform design and prototype development in order to create interoperable, open, privacyrespecting identity and trust management tools that can be demonstrated to the public. These will be used to construct community application prototypes. Finally the prototypes will be trialled and selfevaluated by PICOS concerning usability, ergonomics, legal issues, trust and privacy.
The PICOS Website provides further information about the project and regularily informs about achievements and about upcoming activities of dissemination and exploitation.