The Conferência Ibérica de Sistemas e Tecnologias de Informação (CISTI 2025) was held in Lisbon from 16 to 19 June and Alejandro Pérez de la Fuente, a member of the Privacy Engineering Group (IngPriv) of the School of Computer Engineering at the University of Valladolid, presented his thesis project in a paper entitled Ontologies and AI for auditing privacy in the Internet of Everything (IoE).
The study evaluates the quality of privacy in mobile apps by combining ontologies and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. At a time when the protection of personal data has become a fundamental axis of digital development, this proposal aims to provide a tool that allows developers to audit and improve the privacy performance of their apps.
Mobile applications rely on metadata that describe key aspects of how they handle user data. This metadata is the building block for PET (Privacy Enhancing Technologies) tools, as well as for creating quality indicators. However, it is not enough to store this information: it is essential to ensure its quality so that it can be used effectively and reliably.
Alejandro’s work proposes using ontologies to formally represent key privacy concepts and relationships between them, and AI techniques to detect inconsistencies, conflicts and opportunities for improvement in data processing. This proposal is validated through the App-PIMD repository, which already contains metadata from more than 13,000 mobile apps.