PRISMS · The PRIvacy and Security MirrorS: “Towards a European framework for integrated decision making”

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. It 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 project will achieve these results through a set of work packages providing an analysis of security and privacy technologies (WP2), a policy assessment of security and privacy (WP3), a criminological analysis (WP4), a legal perspective (WP5), a discourse analysis of media attention to privacy, security and trust issues (WP6) and an analysis of existing public opinion surveys (WP7). The findings of these WPs will be integrated (WP8) as part of the preparations for our survey (WP9), the first of its kind to sample public opinion in all Member States on these issues. The survey findings, together with the expert findings from WPs 2 – 7, will be analysed and interpreted in WP10 and form the basis for the decision support system to be devised in WP11.PRISMS will ensure that the expected impacts of the project are widely disseminated through various means, including a high level press conference.