Privacy in a Smart Circular Economy (PITCH)

The UK and the European Union (EU) are keen to reduce waste and promote reuse of resources throughout the European Economic Area (EEA). As part of this drive, a new initiative has been created to promote a Circular Economy in Europe (European Environment Agency, 2016). Circular Economy refers to achieving sustainability by reusing limited and finite resources and keeping them at their highest utilization. In order to achieve this, it has been recently acknowledged that data needs to be reused, re-circulated in or near-real time. This is referred to as data-driven Circular Economy where citizens become prosumers i.e. co-producers and co-creators of the data generated from their devices (European Environment Agency, Circular by Design, 2017). Data-driven Circular Economy is the pinnacle use case of privacy and security of personal data.

This project seeks to create a tool that can be used to facilitate Privacy in a Smart Circular Economy (PITCH). PITCH is a comprehensive privacy risk assessment tool that will facilitate informed decision making of the suitability of data collected from organisations and prosumers for reuse as part of a Smart Circular Economy (SCE).