# The Privacy Flag Observatory: A Crowdsourcing Tool for Real Time Privacy Threats Evaluation
###### Abstract  
Instilling good privacy practices to developers and users appears to be a difficult and daunting task. The World Wide Web encompasses a panspermia of different technologies, commercial and open source apis, evolving security standards and protocols that can be deployed towards the implementation of complex, powerful, web applications. At the same time, the proliferation of applications and services on all types of devices has also increased the attack surface for privacy threats. In this paper, we present the Privacy Flag Observatory, a platform which is one of the main tools produced by the Privacy Flag eu funded research project. The goal of this initiative is to raise awareness among European citizens of the potential privacy threats that beset the software and services they trust and use every day, including websites and smartphone applications. The Privacy Flag Observatory is one of the components that contributed to a large extent, to the success of the project's goals. It is a real-time security and privacy threat monitoring platform whose aim is to collect, archive, analyze and present security and privacy-related information to the broader public as well as experts. Although the platform relies on crowdsourcing information gathering strategies and interacts with several other components installed on users' devices or remote servers and databases, in this paper, we focus on the observatory platform referring only cursorily to other components such as the mobile phone add-on. crybersecurity; cybercrime; ICT security; social network analysis; security tools +
Footnote †: journal: Cybersecurity and Privacy  
one from Personal Computers [2]. The wide adoption of lightweight computing systems with \"smart\" capabilities and fast Internet connectivity has created a diverse, massive, ecosystem of hundreds of millions mobile devices and IoT equipment [3]. Despite the strict security and privacy requirements for mobile devices, a non-negligible number of manufactures and users does not comply with them. For instance, although a significant number of smartphone models and portable devices has been discontinued and left unsupported, their users continue to use them despite known vulnerabilities [4]. To make things worse, prior to the enactment of the _General Data Protection Regulation_ (gdpr), the incentive for application developers to explicitly address security and privacy issues _by design_ and not as an afterthought was quite limited. Today, data breach incidents are alarmingly rising in number and severity. Additionally, there is a global tendency for people to create virtual digital \"selves\" and online profiles, mostly on information-leaking social media platforms, rich in personal (and possibly private) information. Thus, there may be significant privacy and security risks even by having a device only connected to the Internet without any further action. Social media activity, saved passwords, sensitive medical information and even visited places or websites can provide valuable information about people. Such type of personal information is highly valued in the digital underworld and is traded by hackers. What is more important is that such personal data trading may take place even without the intervention of hackers or malicious groups, simply by the data brokers as the notorious Cambridge Analytica scandal demonstrated [5]. This and other similar data trading scandals brought to light clearly demonstrate the fragility of users' privacy as well as the necessity to educate users about their rights to their personal data. To enable users to defend themselves against this gloomy situation and develop the necessary privacy awareness, the main objective of the Privacy Flag eu research project was to propose and develop a novel awareness approach which combines the \"wisdom of the crowd\", i.e., crowdsourcing, with the power of automated privacy and security analysis tools.