4-month placement opportunity: Developing a cartography of virtual mobility: a data-driven approach
4-month placement opportunity
Developing a cartography of virtual mobility: a data-driven approach
Background
The transition to green mobility has been positioned at the national and European level as the first strategic step towards decarbonised transportation. Today, services offered to users by mobility operators heavily rely on smartphone apps, e.g., trip planning, ticketing, information announcement, etc. The roll-out of these applications raises several challenges in terms of data privacy [1][2] as they require the collection of user data to operate e.g., [3]. Mobility behaviours can easily be exploited as a new feed of data for user profiling [4][5]. Despite the enforcement of data regulation frameworks (e.g., EU GDPR, European Digital Service Act) [6], embedded trackers in smartphone apps can be executed in the background to collect personal information that is not a requirement per se for delivering the requested mobility service.
Scope/objectives
The objective of this 4-month research placement project is to contribute to current efforts in the team that investigate the privacy risks associated with the use of smartphone applications. In particular, the project will focus on the development of a method based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) to enable the automatic extraction of privacy information contains in the terms and conditions of an application.
The work will be divided in four main steps:
1. To analyse privacy policy practices of smartphone applications for mobility from an existing dataset.
2. To contribute to create a labeled dataset of terms and conditions associated with these applications.
3. To develop a methodology to enable the automatic extraction of privacy information from the terms and conditions of an application.
4. To test the methodology on real data.
Required skills
– Student in Computer Science, ICT Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or any relevant fields
– Knowledge and ideally some implementation experience in any of the following areas: data engineering, machine learning, software engineering
– An appetence for research projects and multi-disciplinary settings
– A working knowledge of English
About the placement
The placement position is for 4 months starting September 2025 It will be held at Ecole nationale des ponts et chaussees, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France.
To apply, please email to Dr Daphne Tuncer (daphne dot tuncer @enpc dot fr)
– your CV
– a personalised cover letter
– your transcripts of the last 2 years
Incomplete applications will be rejected.
References
[1] L. Barrera Cano, S. Raza, B. Sekibo, A. Siafaras, Q.Wolf, Z. Yin,W. Xu, and D. Tuncer, « A Comparative Perspective of Data Regulation Frameworks and their Implications for Connected Vehicles, »ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Joint Workshops on (TAURIN+BGI ’22), Amsterdam, Netherlands, August, 2022.
[2] D. Tuncer, et al., « Engineering data-driven solutions for future mobility: perspectives and challenges, » Technical report, arXiv preprint, 2203.07789, cs.CY, March, 2022.
[3] Javiera Alegría Dinamarca, and Javier Bustos Jiménez, « Tag Managers: A Closer Look at the Privacy and Security Risks, » TMA PhD School, Poster, 2023.
[4] Teng, Fei, et al. « Balancing privacy and access to smart meter data: an Energy Futures Lab briefing paper, » 2022.
[5] D. Hasselquist, M. Lindblom and N. Carlsson, « Lightweight Fingerprint Attack and Encrypted Traffic Analysis on News Articles, » IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking), pp. 1-9, Catania, Italy, 2022.
[6] S. Vergnolles, « Putting collective intelligence to the enforcement of the Digital Services Act, » arXiv preprint, arXiv:2305.01959, May 2023.