Trip report from the Privacy Symposium

This is a cross-post from Burton Group’s Identity Blog.

BTW, I am moderating a panel at Defrag. If you use “ig1” as a registration code, you get $200 off the registration fee. Hope to see you there!

A few weeks ago I was up in Cambridge at the Privacy Summer Symposium.  Gathered together on Harvard’s campus were a collection of lawyers, activists, government officials, and privacy officers discussing various aspects of privacy.  It was certainly a bit of a change for me to be in a non-tech heavy conference.  Besides hearing people like the chairman of the FTC, William Kovacic, speak, I got to witness the launch of EPIC’s Privacy ’08 campaign.  Further, I got to hear Jeffery Rosen share his thoughts on potential privacy “Chernobyls,” events and trends that will fundamentally alter our privacy in the next 3 to 10 years.

Privacy Chernobyl #1 – Targeted Ads

We’ve already seen enough concern over targeted ads to trigger Congressional hearings.  The Energy and Commerce Committee in the House has been asking ISPs and advertising providers to answer questions as to how they track and use clickstream data. Not be left out, the EU has notified the UK that it must respond to an inquiry whether the Phorm system violated EU data privacy laws.  From NebuAd to Phorm to DoubleClick and beyond, targeted ads are getting more and more targeted.  The real concern for Rosen is the downstream use of the collected clickstream data.  For example, my ISP may not directly do anything overly odious with the information about which sites I visit, but if they sell that information, the 2nd and 3rd generation data users may bit a more nefarious.

Privacy Chernobyl #2 – Personally identifiable search term leak

The knowledge of who I am and what I search for can be used in a variety of ways: from serving voyeuristic desires to putting me in a compromising situation.  Without being able to provide the context for the searches, I could be judged by a people like a potential employer, dating service, or insurance provider unfairly, and these judgments can have a real impact on my life.  As YouTube has to disclose data for its court case, I have to imagine there are some people who really don’t want identifiable searches being disclosed into the public record.  As more and more of our web browsing is search driven, the potential impact of this problem will only grow.

Privacy Chernobyl #3 – Unexpected data exposure on Facebook

There are two concerns to this issue.  The first concern is one that Rosen categorized as data exposure in unexpected ways.  I may have tailored my Facebook profile’s privacy settings to what I think strikes a decent balance between my desire to connect to people and maintaining some level of privacy.  But what is unclear is how Facebook application developers are using my data, including clickstream data.  I don’t expect to hear a friend tell me that I “friended” a product whose ad appeared in Facebook for her, and I certainly never want to hear that this has happened.

Continue reading Trip report from the Privacy Symposium

Privacy in Transition – No Kidding

I am headed up to Harvard this evening to attend the Privacy Symposium.  I am very much looking forward to this industrial-strength dose of privacy discussions.  This will also be a bit different for me as the majority of speakers are lawyers.  Usually, I sit in conferences listening to techies and the occasional auditor.  The Privacy Symposium speaker list is lawyer and professor heavy with a few representations from the tech world.  It ought to be a nice change.

The subtitle of this Privacy Symposium is “Privacy in Transition.”  Well timed.  I look around my neighborhood and my city and I can practically see those transitions in real time.  I’ve talked about the security cameras in my neighborhood before.  This weekend, the Washington Post reports that DC is planning on sing license plate readers to “fight terrorism.”  Find stolen cars – sure.  Find Osama bin laden – not so much.  The District has got to release data retention plans for this data quickly.  For now, the word is that this data will not be retained.  The systems checks plates against “Federal databases” and looks for matches.  (How long until we have a No-Fly list equivalent of license plates?)  I have to imagine that the data retention policy will change very quickly.  How long until third parties get access to this data?  I can see the District using the revenue it makes from selling access to this data to divorce lawyers to pay for school repairs.

At any rate, I’ll be in Cambridge this week mulling some of these ideas over hearing more on matters like these.  See you there.