Privacy by Design: An oxymoron, an impossibility or the way to go? A Big Picture seminar in Brisbane

Actions speak louder than words: APEC Launches New Privacy Enforcement Initiative

Practical Privacy: What goes around …

Two of the last projects I initiated as Privacy Commissioner were:

•    The first Privacy Impact Assessment Guide; and
•    Privacy & Boards: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You.

The first PIA Guide was finalised and launched in August 2006 by my successor, Karen Curtis.  The launch and its subsequent promulgation and uptake within Government has been a real success story.

Health Information Exchange becoming a reality in Canada. When in Australia?

Done right, an approach based on Health Information Exchange would be vastly CHEAPER AND BETTER if government established a well regulated,  competitive market place for the supply of services instead of building a monopoly that will inevitably fall behind the 8-ball.

Canada is getting on with the job that matters with eHealth information:  Health Information Exchange (I call it HIX…).  In Australia, are we running the risk of building last century’s equivalent: a large, monolithic Health Information Record (eHR) system?

Hopefully not.

Safe Highway, Safe Car, Safe Driver: the online versions?

It has taken a couple of generations of continuous effort since Ralph Nader and Unsafe at Any Speed to make significant inroads into the road toll; that said, we still have more to do.

W3C Workshop on Privacy for Advanced Web APIs

W3C and PrimeLife are convening a W3C Workshop on Privacy for Advanced Web APIs on 12-13 July. This is long overdue!

The Background to the Call for Participation in the Workshop puts it this way:

"As the Web advances toward becoming an application development platform that addresses needs previously met by native applications, work proceeds on APIs to access information that was previously not available to Web developers. The broad availability of possibly sensitive data collected through location sensors and other facilities in a Web browser is just one example of the broad new privacy challenges that the Web faces today."

Better Formats for Privacy Notices: Food Safety labels? Symbols?

Some interesting research has emerged from CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University. 

Two days in Washington DC looking at the future of privacy

The first was a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the International Association of Privacy Professionals. It was broadcast from the National Press Club of America and featured a panel of distinguished speakers debating "The Future of the Privacy Profession". The celebration also launched a new IAPP publication, "A Call for Agility: The Next-Generation Privacy Professional".

The panellists each drew out different aspects of a surprisingly unified view on what will happen over the next ten years. 

Business input to privacy & security frameworks that deliver: RSA, End to End Trust & the remarks of Microsoft’s Scott Charney

In the last couple of blogs, "EC thinking on privacy definitely on the move…" and "Ahead of the Curve?…", I described renewed official interest in re-thinking privacy frameworks that have been around for some time. The re-think is becoming critical and unavoidable in light of the realities of the online world, new technologies and how people often want to use them.

But business has not been idle either. This includes joint initiatives between officials and leading businesses with an interest in ‘finding a better way’.

EC thinking on privacy definitely on the move…

The European Commission (EC) and its partners hosted a conference on “Trust in the Information Society” in Spain 10-11 February where the winds of change became even more apparent.

This was a conference organised under the huge Framework Program 7 (FP 7) research stream funded by the European Commission. FP 7 has a very impressive research component on ICT Trust and Security Research under its ICT Challenge 1: Pervasive and Trustworthy Network and Service Infrastructures.  

Ahead of the Curve? Recent trans-Atlantic thinking on privacy that sounds familiar

At the risk of mixing metaphors, it seems that there is movement at the station, on both sides of the Atlantic, on the need for new thinking on how best to respect personal information about individuals and manage the risks to which they might be exposed as a consequence of its collection, use and disclosure.

Throughout 2009 as the word was getting around you could hear the horsemen gathering in the distance, now they can be seen gathering on the horizon.   

Cloud Computing Made Simple

Cloud computing has been a popular term for a year or two now, but many of us still don’t know what it is or its implications. To a degree, it is old wine in new bottles (hotmail has been around for over a decade now) but it is also so much more. 

This has led to some pretty slick selling of the concept without being entirely straight forward as to the impact on the interests of all stakeholders. In an article titled “Salesforce.com: Cloud Computing is a game-changer”, Peter Coffee is quoted as saying: