Privacy Flag: A crowdsourcing platform for reporting and managing privacy and security risks.

Nowadays we are witnessing an unprecedented evolution in how we gather and process information. Technological advances in mobile devices as well as ubiquitous wireless connectivity have brought about new information processing paradigms and opportunities for virtually all kinds of scientific and business activity. These new paradigms rest on three pillars: i) numerous powerful portable devices operated by human intelligence, ubiquitous in space and available, most of the time, ii) unlimited environment sensing capabilities of the devices, and iii) fast networks connecting the devices to Internet information processing platforms and services. These pillars implement the concepts of crowdsourcing and collective intelligence. These concepts describe online services that are based on the massive participation of users and the capabilities of their devices.in order to produce results and information which are more than the sum of the part. The EU project Privacy Flag relies exactly on these two concepts in order to mobilize roaming citizens to contribute, through crowdsourcing, information about risky applications and dangerous web sites whose processing may produce emergent threat patterns, not evident in the contributed information alone, reelecting a collective intelligence action. Crowdsourcing and collective intelligence, in this context, has numerous advantages, such as raising privacy-awareness among people. In this paper we summarize our work in this project and describe the capabilities and functionalities of the Privacy Flag Platform.