About

REAL-PETS is a European research and innovation project developing the next generation of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) to protect citizens against online tracking, surveillance, and privacy abuses across web, mobile, IoT, and emerging digital platforms. The project combines cutting-edge research in privacy engineering, cryptography, software analysis, usability, and European data protection law to create effective, scalable, and user-friendly privacy solutions. REAL-PETS will develop technologies such as adaptive traffic obfuscation, privacy-preserving analytics, anonymous credentials, and post-quantum-ready protection mechanisms. Through real-world pilots, regulatory engagement, and standardisation activities, the project aims to strengthen Europe's digital sovereignty while making privacy protection more transparent, accessible, and effective for everyone.

Vision

REAL-PETS envisions a digital future where privacy is a built-in feature rather than an afterthought. As online services increasingly rely on data collection, tracking, and interconnected devices, individuals need stronger and more accessible tools to maintain control over their personal information. REAL-PETS aims to advance the state of the art in Privacy-Enhancing Technologies by developing practical, scalable, and user-centric solutions that work across diverse digital environments. By combining technological innovation, legal expertise, and human-centred design, the project seeks to make privacy protection seamless and effective for everyone. Ultimately, REAL-PETS contributes to a trustworthy, privacy-preserving digital ecosystem that strengthens individual rights, fosters innovation, and supports Europe's digital sovereignty.

Keyfacts

Reference

Reference Number:
101309318
Programme type:
HORIZON-EUROPE
Programme acronym:
HORIZON-CL3-2025-02-CS-ECCC-03

Duration

Project Start: 01.10.2026
36 Months

Cost and Funding

Costs:
€ 3.851.575,25
Funding:
€ 3.851.575,25

Motivation

Despite Europe’s strong regulatory framework for privacy and data protection, online tracking technologies continue to evolve faster than existing protections. Modern tracking methods increasingly operate across websites, mobile apps, IoT devices, and emerging digital platforms, making them difficult to detect and control. At the same time, many Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) remain fragmented, platform-specific, and challenging for users to understand or adopt. REAL-PETS was created to address this gap. By combining advanced privacy research, legal analysis, and human-centred design, the project aims to develop privacy solutions that are effective, practical, and scalable. Its goal is to ensure that privacy protection keeps pace with technological innovation and remains accessible to all users.

Mission and Objectives

REAL-PETS aims to strengthen privacy and data protection in Europe by developing the next generation of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs). The project addresses the growing challenge of cross-platform online tracking by combining advanced privacy research, legal expertise, and human-centred design. Through agile detection of emerging privacy threats, compliance-aware technology development, and large-scale real-world validation, REAL-PETS seeks to deliver privacy solutions that are effective, trustworthy, and easy to use. Ultimately, the project contributes to a more transparent, secure, and privacy-respecting digital ecosystem while reinforcing Europe’s technological sovereignty.

Objectives:

  • Detect and model emerging privacy threats by developing agile methodologies capable of identifying and analysing new cross-platform tracking techniques across web, mobile, IoT, wearable, and emerging digital environments.
  • Assess the lawfulness of tracking practices and PETs by combining legal analysis with automated auditing methods to support compliance with European regulations such as GDPR, ePrivacy, DSA, DMA, and CRA.
  • Design, prototype, and validate next-generation PETs, including adaptive traffic obfuscation, privacy-preserving analytics, anonymous credentials, anti-tracking technologies, and post-quantum-ready privacy protections.
  • Develop human-centred privacy solutions by ensuring that PETs are understandable, accessible, transparent, and usable for diverse groups of users.
  • Support standards, best practices, and policy development by translating project outcomes into actionable guidance, reference implementations, and recommendations for regulators, industry, developers, and standardisation bodies.

Work Packages

WP1

Project, Risk and Innovation Management (P1)
3%
01.10.2026
31.03.2028
WP1 is responsible for the operational management and technical vitality of the project, encompassing management tasks on contractual, financial, legal, technical, administrative and ethical levels. The main objectives are the establishment of a sound and flexible project management structure and an efficient management process, and the provision of an effective risk management strategy to avoid deviations from the work plan. Another focus of WP1 is to respond to opportunities through active innovation management. The proposed activities will help to maximise the benefits for consortium partners and stakeholders, and the overall impact of the project.

WP2

Project, Risk and Innovation Management (P2)
0%
01.04.2028
30.09.2029
Objectives: Continuation of WP1

WP3

Foundations for detecting emerging tracking paradigms
3%
01.10.2026
31.03.2028
WP3 will establish the foundational principles and methodologies to model and detect new cookie-less tracking paradigms across popular platforms (i.e., Web, mobile, and IoT). It addresses a critical gap in current privacy methodologies, which remain inadequate to detect novel privacy threats arising from constant technology evolution, ID bridging, fingerprinting, platform interoperability, and the abuse of platform capabilities, protocols, and sensing capabilities by online trackers, including the (ab-)use of Gen-AI technologies. By producing methods to detect and produce new threat models, this WP will enable a paradigm shift in how privacy threats are studied and mitigated across platforms, laying down the pillars to detect emerging tracking paradigms (Obj. 1), produce scalable privacy auditing frameworks (Obj. 2), support adaptative privacy controls and PETs (Obj. 3), and standardise and disseminate project outputs and knowledge (Obj. 5). Methodologies and models will be validated through real-world testing to ensure robustness, scalability, generalisability, and operational feasibility.

WP4

Data-driven privacy violation detection in the wild and at scale
0%
01.04.2028
30.09.2029
WP4 extends WP3. Specifically, this WP will extend and operationalise the methods developed in WP3 to detect abuse in other execution environments like wearables, smart speakers, AR/XR or Gen-AI solutions, including large-scale, data-driven experimentation (T4.3). Like WP3, WP4 will contribute to define the research pillars to achieve Objectives 1 to 5, bridging the gap between controlled laboratory validation and real-world observation and contributing to establishing agile detection methods and mitigations in subsequent WPs. The tasks will run longitudinally to iteratively integrate new threat models and detection methods.

WP5

Legal analysis and audit of detected tracking & the project’s PETs
2%
01.10.2026
31.03.2029
WP5 objectives are as follows: (i) analysing the EU legal landscape regarding privacy and online tracking; (ii) analysing whether online tracking practices identified by REAL-PETS comply with legal requirements; (iii) analysing the main legal requirements for the PETs developed in this project; (iv) explore the gap between legal text and automatic methods for regulatory audits; (v) identifying gaps or weaknesses in the legal regulation on online tracking and privacy, and if there are any, provide suggestions to policymakers to improve the rules. Relevant legal requirements may follow, for instance, from regulations like the GDPR, the ePrivacy Directive, the CRA, the DMA, and the DSA. This transversal WP contributes to Obj. 1, 2, 3 & 5.

WP6

PETS for traffic obf., online tracking and privacy analytics (P1)
3%
01.10.2026
31.03.2028
WP6 develops new real-world PETs that strengthen network-level privacy and resilience against AI-driven traffic analysis attacks; and enable trustworthy, privacy-preserving network measurements supporting transparent and resilient decentralized network management without exposing sensitive user data. These tools will be evaluated in pilots to advance deployable, open-source PETs that reinforce Europe’s leadership in privacy-by-design and resilient network infrastructures, contributing primarily to Obj. 3 and 4. To achieve these goals, WP6 will address key research challenges required to enhance the resilience and deployability of PET solutions that protect communications from network traffic analysis: (i) adaptive noise pilot to enhances communication privacy in real-world deployed networks against AI-driven traffic analysis; (ii) post-quantum-ready cryptographic protections into privacy-preserving multi-hop packet formats such as Sphinx, ensuring long-term confidentiality for both data content and communication metadata, (iii) privacy-preserving telemetry for decentralized network measurements, IoT-threat identification, and the collection of aggregate user statistics, enabling data-driven network management, service reliability, and system transparency, without compromising user privacy.

WP7

PETS for traffic obf., online tracking and privacy analytics (P2)
0%
01.04.2028
30.09.2029
WP7 extends WP6, focusing on adaptability, usability, and interoperability with real-world deployments. It advances smart noise generation and privacy-preserving telemetry, while designing effective methods for limiting commercial surveillance (e.g., Ad-tech) that can be adopted by users today. In addition to WP6 objectives, this WP will: (i) research and evaluate novel network privacy protections based on smart noise and traffic splitting techniques in T7.1, extending T6.1 noise-generation with adaptive, dynamic and context-aware features, (ii) develop and assess prototype pilots for privacy-preserving user-experience and reputation metrics that increase transparency, including IoT threat detection methods in T7.2, enabling user feedback and QoS evaluation in decentralized infrastructures; (iii) design and validate privacy-preserving access-control and age verification based on Attribute-Based Credentials (ABCs) in T7.3, in compliance with GDPR and eIDAS; and (iv) design and prototype PETS for limiting commercial tracking on mobile, IoT and web. WP7 contributes primarily to Obj. 3 and 4.

WP8

Usability & human-centred design
1%
01.10.2026
30.09.2029
This WP has the overall objective to ensure that the novel PETS developed in the project are usable, trusted and adopted by a broad range of users, ensuring that they are easy to configure with suitable trade-off settings. While this WP directly maps to Obj. 4, its impact is transversal to all project objectives. This WP will start by analysing users’ needs and requirements for usable PETs, followed by a human-centred and inclusive design approach for developing and evaluating usable and accessible user interface (UI) concepts and prototypes for transparency and configuring PETs. Finally, this WP will develop usability guidelines for PET developers and will evaluate REAL-PETS solutions through user-centred pilots.

WP9

Communication, Dissem., Exploitation and Standardisation (P1)
3%
01.10.2026
31.03.2028
In line with the Grant Agreement (GA), this WP aims to maximise the visibility, impact, and uptake of the project results by implementing a strategic plan for communication, dissemination, exploitation, and standardisation activities. It ensures that the scientific community, industry stakeholders, policy makers, and the wider public are effectively informed and engaged throughout the project lifecycle (see communication and dissemination plan in Section 2.2) and synergies with relevant national and European activities are established. Additionally, it fosters alignment with relevant standards and promotes the adoption of FAIR principles to support interoperability and reuse of the threat models, analysis tools and PET foundations developed.

WP10

Communication, Dissem, Exploitation and Standardisation (P2)
0%
01.04.2028
30.09.2029
Continuation of WP9. Yet, WP10 extends WP9 by integrating the over-arching REAL-PETS Privacy Observatory (T10.4) to aggregate and standardize all interdisciplinary project outcomes.

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