With more and more of our information being stored in social media, businesses and other organisations, data protection and privacy is becoming a growing concern. We want more ownership of our information- where it is, who wants to access it and how to control its dissemination. This is especially true of sensitive information submitted to institutions such as Local Authorities. The implementation of GDPR and other privacy laws are highlighting the importance of securing and managing your information in a transparent and user-friendly way.

This need became the foundation for the OPERANDO project.

What is OPERANDO?

OCC co-ordinated the OPERANDO (Online Privacy Enforcement, Rights Assurance and Optimization) project, which is EU H2020 funded. OPERANDO created an open source platform used to provide secure storage and privacy enforcement of personal data as a dedicated cloud service. This is a relatively new idea: Privacy as a Service (PaaS). The aim of this project was to empower consumers to have more control over the data that they transfer to online service providers. The service itself does not hold any user data except their account password, email address and privacy preferences.

Features

OPERANDO supports two scenarios: B2C (Business to Consumer) and G2C (Government to Consumer).

For the Business to Consumer scenario, the platform is branded as PlusPrivacy. PlusPrivacy is an innovative open source internet privacy service. It includes:

• A dashboard which allows you to choose the privacy settings for all your social networks.
• The ability for you to generate and use up to 20 alternative email identities in conjunction with your regular email service.
• Ad-blocking and anti-tracking features.

For the Government to Consumer scenario, two of the key targets are social care and health. Local Authorities providing social care and using OPERANDO will be able to avoid inadvertent exposure of unsolicited information and promote privacy compliance. OPERANDO will allow their citizens (users) to:

• Review their privacy policies.
• Inspect a log of how their data is being used.
• Control which third parties have access to it.

The second target was the registration of new patients with a GP. OPERANDO can offer patients more control over the use of their personal data.

OCC’s Work

In addition to three years of co-ordinating 9 partners in the OPERANDO project, OCC was responsible for:

• Development for G2C components
• Presenting the project at events
• Gathering requirements from UK Service Providers
• User testing with healthcare providers and Local Authorities in the UK
• Market Analysis
• Communicating with the EU Commission

The Future

Some of our future plans with OPERANDO include:

• Connect with SME OSP opportunities to improve healthcare applications in the UK.
• Pursue health and social care integration with our current products
• Reusing the OPERANDO platform as a test site for RestAssured, another H2020 project in the works

OCC is looking to continue to expand the results and outcomes in the ever-evolving OPERANDO project.