The PRISMS project will analyse the traditional trade-off model between privacy and security and devise a more evidence-based perspective for reconciling privacy and security, trust and concern. It will examine how technologies aimed at enhancing security are subjecting citizens to an increasing amount of surveillance and, in many cases, causing infringements of privacy and fundamental rights.
The PRISMS project will conduct both a multidisciplinary inquiry into the concepts of privacy and security and their relationships and an EU-wide survey to determine whether people evaluate the introduction of security technologies in terms of a trade-off. As a result, the project will determine the factors that affect public assessment of the security and privacy implications of a given security technology. The project will use these results to devise a decision support system providing users (those who deploy and operate security systems) insight into the pros and cons, constraints and limits of specific security investments compared to alternatives taking into account a wider society context.
The PRISMS project starts with a multidimensional analysis of the relation between privacy and security from the different perspectives of technology, policy, media, criminology and law. These diverse perspectives offer the analytical background against which perceptions and attitudes of citizens can be studied. The consortium will also determine the factors that affect public assessment of the security and privacy implications of a given security technology. Having analysed the conceptualisations of and interrelations between privacy and security, the consortium plans to test and validate its analysis in interviews, focus groups and workshops which will bring together various stakeholder groups (citizens, policy advisors, security people, societal organisations, criminologists, techno-political scientists).
The core of PRISMS will be a full-fledged survey which investigates the opinions, attitudes and behaviour of a representative sample of citizens from each of the 27 Member States of the Union on privacy and security. The project will use these results to devise a decision support system providing users (those who deploy and operate security systems) insight into the pros and cons, constraints and limits of specific security investments compared to alternatives taking into account a wider society context. The decision support system will need to reconcile the various dimensions such that the results can be understood in terms of discriminating between options for security investments.
01.02.2012 - 31.07.2015
Trilateral Research & Consulting, United Kingdom
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Research Group on Law Science Technology & Society, Belgium
Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research - TNO, The Netherlands
Eötvös Károly Institute, Hungary
Zuyd University, The Netherlands
Market & Opinion Research International Limited, United Kingdom
University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI