Inria and the CNIL award the 2017 "privacy protection" prize to a European research team

On 26 January 2018 Daniel Le Metayer, Inria research director and president of the jury, and Florence Raynal, head of the CNIL's European and international affairs department, presented the CNIL-Inria Prize at the CPDP conference in Brussels. This European prize, created by the CNIL and Inria in 2016 as part of the partnership between the two institutions, aims to encourage scientific research on the protection of privacy.

It is also an opportunity to raise the scientific community's awareness of data protection issues and the need to develop research projects in this field, particularly in the light of developments brought about by the European Regulation on the protection of personal data and in particular the new requirements for privacy by design and accountability.

The award-winning article is entitled "Engineering privacy by design reloaded" and was presented at the Amsterdam Privacy Conference in 2015. It analyses the methods used by engineers to apply Privacy by Design strategies. The authors distinguish different minimization strategies (such as minimizations of collection, data linkage, retention time, centralization, etc.) and relate them to minimization of privacy risks. They provide guidelines for minimising the amount of data entrusted to data controllers or processors, and go further into a reflection that they had previously discussed in a previous article on the implementation of Privacy by Design. The article presents a practical point of view and could serve as an inspiration to software developers and developers, a particularly useful contribution when implementing the new European regulation.

The prize was awarded by the jury members, seven renowned researchers in digital sciences: Emiliano De Cristofaro, José Domingo Ferrer, Simone Fischer-Hübner, Sébastien Gambs, Krishna Gummadi, Jaap-Henk Hoepman and Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, two CNIL members: Gwendal Le Grand, Director of Technology and Innovation and Matthieu Grall, Head of Technology Expertise and two research directors at Inria: Claude Castelluccia and Daniel le Métayer. More than twenty articles were submitted to the jury.