"Coventry University Researchers Shocked by Excessive Data Harvesting by Apps"
Researchers at Coventry University are helping people protect their privacy after finding excessive data collection by websites and apps. Citizen Scientists Investigating Cookies and App General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance (CSI-COP) is an award-winning privacy project led by the Centre for Computational Science and Mathematical Modelling (CSM) at Coventry University in partnership with nine other organizations. Its purpose is to investigate what personal data websites and apps automatically track when a user visits a web page or uses an app, and which have been designed to be more privacy-friendly. As part of the project, members of the public were recruited and trained as 'citizen scientists' to investigate the cookie notices and privacy policies used by websites and mobile apps. The CSI-COP collaborators and privacy champions will present their findings, unveiling a repository of cookies and online trackers containing the project's findings on over 1,000 websites and apps. The repository will allow people to determine if CSI-COP featured an app they use or a website they visited. This article continues to discuss the CSI-COP project and repository.