International Max Planck Research School for
Privacy Enhancing Technologies for the Digital Society

The application portal is online: https://apply.cis.mpg.de/register/imprs-pet-ds-2026 (Deadline June 30)

Given the complexity of digital infrastructures and applications, information can leak at many layers, e.g., through network metadata that can reveal which services are accessed, through application metadata that can reveal our location, or through application data that can reveal a vast amount of personal information that we share with digital services. To reclaim our digital privacy, we must take a holistic approach: one that builds protections across every layer of the stack.

This IMPRS, a joint effort by MPI-SP and Ruhr University Bochum (RUB), will tackle this challenge through five focus areas, each designed to foster fundamental research that can provide solid foundations to a digital society where privacy is the default. These areas will develop new cryptographic building blocks that can be used to build privacy-preserving systems that provide long-term protection; will rethink computational and network infrastructures such that they can, by design, support privacy-preserving interactions; will develop novel means to reason about the use of data and design of systems to enable the creation of responsible, user-centric digital systems, and will investigate the potential of designing machine-learning based systems that are respectful of users privacy and societal norms.