The XCarcity WP5 meeting was held on 29 November 2024 at CVD Apeldoorn. It provided a platform for the WP5 team to discuss progress, requirements, and ongoing research.
During the meeting, Fatemeh Marzani delivered a presentation titled “Data Privacy is Not Data Protection.” She highlighted the key differences between the two concepts:
- Data Protection concerns who can access the data.
- Data Privacy focuses on what can be learned from the data.
As part of WP5’s goal to enable privacy-preserving mobility data collection for updating the Digital Twin, she emphasized the importance of not only protecting data but also ensuring that the insights derived from it do not compromise individual privacy. She explained that if any information can be linked back to individuals, it constitutes a breach of privacy.
Fatemeh also discussed the methods her team is developing to ensure the privacy of crowd monitoring systems. This includes defining what types of queries are permissible and ensuring the system cannot answer queries that risk exposing individual identities.
The meeting included input from researchers at Delft University of Technology, DingShan Sun and Victor Knoop, who reported the progress on multi-modal traffic network modeling and long-term strategic traffic management. In addition, they discussed the types of mobility data required for long-term strategic traffic management and the next steps on short-term real-time multi-modal traffic control.
A lively discussion followed on how to monitor crowds using technologies like cameras while preserving privacy. The group explored solutions to ensure that while cameras can collect data, individuals cannot be identified. Instead, the focus should remain on aggregate metrics like the number of people at a location or their movement between locations, without revealing personal identities. Pierre, a business partner of WP5 from OpenRemote, also participated in the meeting. He provided valuable advice on practical use cases and insights into how privacy laws apply to such scenarios.
