Special Edition Blog Series on PhD Abstracts (Part II)
This post is a continuation of the blog post series on PhD abstracts. You can find the first part of the series here.
Tommaso Crepax: Unchaining Data portability in a Lawful Digital Economy.
Data portability is a key instrument to realize the EU policy vision on data governance. Because it allows for data sharing and re-use through forms of access control, it has the power to benefit all players while adequately protecting their rights. Regrettably, economic, legal, and technical issues have hindered the development of information exchange systems supporting data portability. To create platforms and tools for data portability, developers need that emerging expertise of “legal engineers” identifies the legal requirements, to make sure that users, consumers, and “prosumers” can enjoy their rights securely, effectively, and without infringing others’ rights and legitimate interests. This research aims at finding such legal requirements inside the actual, dynamic wave of EU legislation on the issues of data governance (including data sharing, access, control, re-usability), competition in digital markets and provision of digital services. This quest for legal requirements moves beyond black letter law, leveraging case law development, as well as European and national relevant authorities’ guidance. The goal is to clarify what is requested to developers of portability services and personal data controllers in terms of implementable organizational and technical measures. This clarification effort uses established methods of requirements engineering elicitation and documentation, and is carried out with the use of relational databases. It is coordinated with the mapping of relevant ISO standards (most importantly, ISO/IEC 27701), and further evaluated for compatibility with the elicited requirements in a loop that potentially leads to guidelines for either reform or implementation. Lastly, this work provides a list of technical solutions as individuated by relevant authorities, case law and field experts.
Cristian Lepore: A Framework to Assess E-Identity Solutions
Digital identity is important for businesses and governments to grow. When apps or 
websites ask us to create a new digital identity or log in using a big platform, we do not know what happens to our data. That is why experts and governments are working on creating a safe and trustworthy digital identity. This identity would let anyone file taxes, rent a car, or prove their financial income easily and privately. This new digital identity is called Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). In our work, we propose an SSI-based model to evaluate different identity options and we then prove our model value on the European identity framework.
