Neither regulation nor technology alone can protect Europeans’ privacy in the digital age. Despite the EU’s world-leading legal framework—from the GDPR and ePrivacy Directive to the DSA and the DMA—citizens remain vulnerable to opaque and fast-evolving online tracking practices that exploit gaps across platform controls. Existing Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are fragmented, reactive, and often unusable, failing to keep pace with the sophistication of tracking practices and the complexity of real-world digital platforms.
REAL-PETS addresses this urgent gap by rethinking PETs from the ground up, integrating empirical detection of privacy abuses, regulatory compliance, and human-centred design into a single, agile research framework. It will develop scalable, cross-platform PETs—including adaptive “smart-noise” defences, privacy-preserving analytics, anonymous credentials, and post-quantum-ready encryption—capable of protecting users across the web, mobile, and IoT ecosystems. These technologies will be validated through real-world pilots with PET providers, enabling continuous, evidence-based improvement and rapid transfer to market and policy domains.
The consortium unites nine partners from six countries, combining top academic expertise in privacy research (IMDEA, RU, KAU, UC3M) covering usability, legal and technical research expertise, with innovative SMEs (TEC, MULINI, NYM, AppCensus, MVD) that lead in VPNs and large-scale auditing. This balanced composition ensures scientific excellence and strong exploitation capacity to accelerate Europe’s leadership in privacy innovation.
REAL-PETS will generate long-lasting technological, societal, and industrial impact: strengthening EU technological sovereignty, enabling regulators to enforce privacy rules through empirical evidence, technology standardisation, fostering privacy-resilient products and services, and empowering citizens with usable, transparent, and trustworthy privacy protections.
Funded by the European Union and the European Cybersecurity Competence Centre through Horizon Europe program call HORIZON-CL3-2025-02-CS-ECCC-03.
