In an increasingly instrumented and inter-connected digital world, citizens generate vast amounts of data, much of it being valuable and a significant part of it being personal. However, controlling who can collect it, limiting what they can do with it, and determining how best to protect it, remain deeply undecided issues. 
CAP-A will deploy a socio-technical solution based on collective awareness and informed consent, where by data collection and use by digital products are driven by the expectations and needs of the consumers themselves, through a collaborative participatory process and the configuration of collective privacy norms. The proposed solution will create a new innovation model that will complement existing top-down approaches to data protection, which mainly rely on technical or legal provisions.

The project will deliver a global repository of consumer-and developer-generated content about the privacy behaviour of digital products, along with tools that will help consumers understand the Terms of Service and their implications via crowdsourced approaches and visual cues. The objective is to foster collective intelligence and co-creation of solutions, and to facilitate the participation of all involved stakeholders through an open architecture, thereby allowing novel uses of the privacy-related content. Ultimately, the CAP-A ecosystem that will be formed will strengthen the trust bond between service developers and users, encouraging innovation and empowering the individuals to promote their privacy expectations as a quantifiable, community-generated request.