The privacy observatory, has been established to bring together technologists, representatives of the national and European privacy authorities, as well as nongovernmental privacy related associations. In summary, the aim of the privacy observatory is to assist authorities as a technical consultant in the field of privacy-preserving data mining. More specifically, we believe that regulations and laws will be enacted as a response to existing and future privacy-preserving methods, including those that may be developed by the researchers within the various WGs of MODAP. The goal of the observatory is to harmonize the resulting regulations with the activities of technologists and the researchers.

The activities of the observatory will include the creation, and maintenance, of relationships with the European Commission authority and the national authorities of the countries that are partners of the consortium. Such relationships are aimed to properly implement the resulting regulations into the research methods and tools and to provide refinements of the technical regulations regarding privacy-preserving analysis methods. MODAP has a potential to interact with, and inform, organizations that recognize the need for location privacy standards.

The main roles of the observatory are:

• Being the main interface of MODAP with outside world especially to non-experts.
• Technical consultation for privacy related matters.
• Producing opinion-reports on high impact hot topics such as Google street view, and its implication for privacy, new privacy regulation for geo-marketing in Germany and similar.
• Contributing to the editorial board of the MODAP news-letter.

The Privacy Observatory is organizing a web magazine publishing articles on privacy and Mobility from well known experts in the field.

Privacy Observatory Members
Core Members

Dino Pedreschi
KDDLAB, University of Pisa

Fosca Giannotti
KDDLAB, ISTI, CNR

Chiara Renso
KDDLAB, ISTI, CNR

Anna Monreale
KDDLAB, University of Pisa

Maria Damiani
University of Milan

Giovanni Ziccardi
University of Milan

Christine Parent
University of Lausanne

Yannis Theodoridis
University of Piraeus

Dimitrios Gunopulos
University of Athens

Gennady Andrienko
Fraunhofer IAIS

Monica Machowicz
Alterra B.V.

Bart Kuijpers
Hasselt University

Giusella Finocchiaro
University of Bologna

Roberto Lattanzi
Garante per la protezione dei dati personali (Italy)

Solange Ghernaouti-Hélie
University of Lausanne

Networking Members

Sebastien Gambs
Université de Rennes 1 - INRIA/IRISA

Manolis Terrovitis
Institute for the Management of Information Systems, RC Athena

Aris Gkoulalas-Divanis
IBM Research GmbH

Nico Van de Weghe
Ghent University