PARADISE

Professional athletes have to disclose their future whereabouts in the ADAMS online reporting system of the World Anti Doping Agency. This far-reaching collection of personal information is in clear conflict with German privacy laws. In the PARADISE project Fraunhofer FIT aims to make transparent how this information is used. 

Competitive athletes are subject to frequent unannounced doping tests. To make these tests possible, they have to disclose their whereabouts for three months into the future in an online reporting system. This system is highly controversial among the athletes involved, one major criticism being that the athletes have no information on how their personal data is stored and who can access it. The German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) currently funds a project to design a Privacy-enhanced And Reliable Anti-Doping Integrated Service Environment (PARADISE) that aims to restrict access to the personal and location-based data of competitive athletes. A secure system environment developed by Fraunhofer FIT will make sure that only the data needed to plan an upcoming doping test is captured, stored and made accessible to authorized third parties. Thus, this system will safeguard privacy, transparency and the athletes' control over their personal data.

At the core of the project is to design and deploy a wearable device that can localize the athlete 'on demand'. Thus location data is captured and transmitted only when a doping test is imminent. This helps to avoid disclosure of an athlete's complete personal schedule, information that is highly problematic from a privacy point of view. After a doping test, PARADISE lets the athlete find out when their personal data was accessed – a significant improvement in traceability over the current system. And PARADISE restricts access to data on the athlete's current whereabouts to those testing agents that are authorized to carry out a doping test at this particular point in time.

Fraunhofer FIT acts as coordinator for the PARADISE project and is responsible for requirements analysis and for building the wearable device. FIT is also involved in pilot testing and evaluating the solutions developed in the project. Besides FIT, the PARADISE consortium includes Fraunhofer AISEC, gekko mbH, TU Berlin, ULD Schleswig-Holstein and Uniscon GmbH.