The 12th IFIP Summer School on Privacy and Identity Management has extended its Call for Papers and Extended Abstracts until 30 April, giving potential attendees additional time to submit their papers.

With the theme, The Smart World Revolution, the School will be held at the Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy from 3-8 September 2017. It is organised jointly by IFIP Working Groups 9.2, 9.6/11.7, 11.6, and Special Interest Group 9.2.2 in co-operation with the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC).

The School invites contributions from students who are at the stage of preparing a Masters or PhD thesis as well as young researchers and practitioners. It seeks to encourage young academic and industry entrants to the privacy and identity management world to share their own ideas, build up a collegial relationship with others, gain experience in making presentations, and potentially publish a paper through the resulting book proceedings.

The Summer School takes an holistic approach to society and technology, supporting interdisciplinary exchange through keynote and plenary lectures, tutorials, workshops and research paper presentations. In particular, participants’ contributions that combine technical, legal, regulatory, socio-economic, social or societal, political, ethical, anthropological, philosophical, historical or psychological perspectives are welcome. The interdisciplinary character of the work is fundamental to the School.

Smart World Revolution

The world is in the throes of a revolution affecting many technologies. Digital data is an essential resource for economic growth, competitiveness, innovation, job creation and societal progress in general.

To be exploited, data needs to flow across borders and sectors, should be smartly aggregated, and should be accessible and reusable by most stakeholders. The explosion of the phenomenon of the Internet of Things and the increasing diffusion of smart living technologies in all the layers of our society, from houses to hospitals, from cities to critical infrastructures such as energy grids, clearly demonstrate the viability and the advantages of a fully interconnected vision of a smart world. However, the same vision poses concrete concerns relating to the potential antagonism between the trend to share everything on the one hand, and the citizen’s right to privacy and security on the other. Dilemmas also arise concerning opportunities for discrimination, social profiling and social exclusion. 

The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), adopted in April 2016, provides an overarching legislative framework that answers to the concerns regarding data protection. Simultaneously, a new Directive was adopted to protect personal data processed for criminal law enforcement. The more recent European Commission proposal for revision of the e-Privacy Directive, published in January 2017, may eventually provide an instrument to enforce not only the privacy, but also, to some extent, the security of the upper layers of the telecommunication services relevant for implementing a smartly interconnected world.

One of the novelties of the proposed e-Privacy Regulation is the extension of its scope to include new functionally equivalent electronic communications services offered by Over The Top (OTT) players i.e., with no involvement of multi-system operators. 

However, while these legislative instruments define the principles to be respected and enforced, not a lot has been said about the way in which these principles should be deployed technically in different industrial and societal sectors.

Technological advances such as the use of open data, big data, blockchain and sensor development in the Internet of Everything are rapidly changing the societal landscape. Questions arise about who holds what data and where and how that data may be used.  These advances challenge the way privacy and data protection should be provided because current national regulatory mechanisms were not devised with these new technologies and possibilities in mind. What is also clear, from discussions in the general press, media and social media, is that there are also huge societal, social, and ethical concerns about the implications of these emerging technologies both in theory and in their practical deployment. 

Here, indeed, there lies a major scientific and social challenge: how to guarantee, in a homogeneous way, the preservation of privacy and other human rights in a completely heterogeneous and cross-sectoral world, without impairing the potentialities of the raising new smart technologies (IoT, big

data etc.)  These questions, as well as many other current and general research issues surrounding privacy and identity management, will all be addressed by the 2017 IFIP Summer School on Privacy and Identity Management.

The School covers all aspects of privacy and identity and seeks for contributions from a broad range of disciplines (e.g., computer science, informatics, economics, ethics, law, psychology, sociology, history, political and other social sciences, surveillance studies, business and public management).

Student research papers might contribute towards application scenarios, use cases and good practice based upon empirical research and interdisciplinary investigations; they might explore legal, regulatory historical or other issues, or report on other kinds of empirical research: for example, on social practices and effects of the use of new technologies. 

For more information about the 2017 IFIP Summer School, possible topics, submission dates and more, visit http://www.ifip-summerschool.org/