The Eötvös Károly Institute is a member of the PRISMS project consortium. The 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. PRISMS will conduct both a multi-disciplinary 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, PRISMS will determine the factors that affect the 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 (DSS) 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.
Research results of the PRISMS project in 2013
The Eötvös Károly Policy Institute is member of the PRISMS (Privacy and Security Mirrors) research consortium, founded in 2012, where the Institute is performing its activities in cooperation with seven European institutions, within the framework of the FP7 programme of the EU. The Institute is represented in the PRISMS project by Ivan Szekely, and, at the beginning of the project, Szonja Navratil, then Erik Uszkiewicz, followed by Szabina Altsach, and lately Bernadette Somody.
The most relevant events and research result of the year 2013 can be summarized as follows:
- February 2013, London: PRISMS research consortium meeting (I. Szekely participating), where Ivan Szekely and Charles Raab delivered their presentation about the comprehensive analysis of 216 international surveys
- May 2013, Brussels: workshop for participants of Work Package 5 (I. Szekely and E. Uszkiewicz participating), where the Hungarian participants presented the preliminary results of the legal analysis
- August 2013, London: workshop for those conceptualizing the empirical survey to be conducted in the 27 Member States of the EU (I. Szekely participating)
- November 2013, Brussels: interim review of the project results (I. Szekely participating)
Following the theoretical groundwork conducted in the first year, in 2013 the Eötvös Károly Policy Institute participated primarily in the following research activities:
- WP5 (Privacy, data protection and security from a legal perspective), analysing the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights and working out the methodology for this purpose;
- WP7 (Analysis of existing public opinion and social values surveys), continuing the research work started by researchers of EKINT and the University of Edinburgh within the LiSS (Living in Surveillance Societies), COST
- Action type research project;
- (WP9: Survey of citizens’ privacy and security perceptions), conceptualizing the empirical survey to be conducted in all Member States of the European Union.
