Netidee PhD Scholarships

Netidee PhD Scholarships Awarded to Tanja Šarčević and David Schmidt

We are excited to announce that Tanja and David have both been awarded scholarships from netidee for their PhD theses. Netidee is Austria’s major Internet promotion campaign, financed by the Internet Stiftung, which commits to transparency, freedom, and social value on the Internet, promoting open-source and open-access projects.

Tanja Šarčević

Tanja develops in her thesis, called Empowering Data Ownership and Intellectual Property Protection in Open Data Sharing, open-source fingerprinting tools that allow data owners to retain control even after sharing.

By embedding verifiable marks into datasets, it enables traceability and protection against misuse. The work strengthens digital sovereignty and supports a fair, transparent, and trustworthy Internet through accountable data sharing.

David Schmidt

Smartphone apps have become essential for our daily lives, handling communication, finances, health data, and other sensitive data. To function, apps often connect with cloud backends or devices and thus embed information about their communication partners.

In David’s thesis called Hidden Dangers: Uncovering Security and Privacy Risks through Large-scale Mobile App Analysis, he leverage this property to analyze apps at scale, uncovering security and privacy issues in the IoT ecosystem, local network permissions, and the supply chain. By responsibly disclosing the findings, the work help to secure the ecosystem.