2023 CNIL-Inria Prize Celebrates Research on Tracking Via Email Forms

The CNIL and Inria jointly presented the 2022 Privacy Protection Prize at the 16th International Conference on Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP). This European prize was established in 2016 to raise awareness of data protection issues and encourage research projects related to the field. The winning team - whose research paper was mainly selected based on scientific excellence and societal impact - constructed a tool that detects email forms present on 100,000 websites and identifies when these addresses were transmitted to third parties prior to a user action. They discovered that whether the IP address used to visit the sites was located in Europe or the US had an effect on their results, as did the type of device being used. The authors have put their code online, along with an extension to detect email address transmissions. Additionally, a runner-up article was commended by the jury for its adeptness at illustrating risk reidentification. The award was presented by Nataliia Bielova from Inria and François Pellegrini from the CNIL. It was judged by renowned researchers in the privacy field of computer science and data authorities experts.