RTG Privacy and Trust for Mobile Users

Welcome to the website of the Research Training Group Privacy and Trust for Mobile Users (Graduiertenkolleg 2050) funded by the German Research Foundation DFG.

About us

The Doctoral College “Privacy and Trust for Mobile Users” is a highly interdisciplinary collaboration between Computer Science and the fields of Law, Sociology, Information Systems (in Economics), and Usability (in Psychology) funded as Research Training Group by the German National Science Foundation (DFG). We aim at improving the position of mobile users—think of Smartphone users—vis-a-vis Internet-based services, social networks, and sensor-augmented environments (summarized as 'networks').

In the mobile users' experience, these networks and the players therein are becoming increasingly opaque while the users themselves are becoming increasingly transparent. In a multi-disciplinary effort, our Doctoral College counters these “paired trends”—transparent users and opaque networks—with the “paired goals” privacy & trust: privacy is considered as the main instrument for limiting user transparency, while assessing the expected trustworthiness of players in the network is considered as the main instrument for countering the opaqueness of the network players.

The research activities of our RTG are briefly described in our recent flyer (opens in new tab) :