PROFILE (Cominlabs)

The PROFILE project brings together experts from law, computer science and sociology to address the challenges raised by online profiling, following a multidisciplinary approach. More precisely, the project will pursue two complementary and mutually informed lines of research: (i) Investigate, design, and introduce a new right of opposition into the legal framework of data protection to better regulate profiling and to modify the behavior of commercial companies towards being more respectful of the privacy of their users; (ii)S Provide users with the technical means they need to detect stealthy profiling techniques as well as to control the extent of the digital traces they routinely produce. As a case study, we focus on browser fingerprinting, a new profiling technique for targeted advertisement. The project will develop a generic framework to reason on the data collected by profiling algorithms, to uncover their inner working, and make them more accountable to users. PROFILE will also propose an innovative protection to mitigate browser fingerprinting, based on the collaborative reconfiguration of browsers.