Third PrivacyOS: More Privacy, Increased awareness
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Deutsch: [Dritte PrivacyOS-Veranstaltung: Mehr Datenschutz, erhöhtes Bewusstsein | http://www.unwatched.org/node/1571]
Continuing the privacy events after the huge success of the 11th Austrian
Big Brother Awards that took place in the evening of 25 October 2009, the
Third PrivacyOS Conference took place in Vienna on 26-27 October 2009,
focusing on sharing information and best practices among experts in the
field, but also on raising awareness in privacy. .
There was a large variety of presentations in an Open Space format from
participants arriving from 10 countries and representing diverse sectors:
industry, SMEs, government, academia or civil society.
The event is part of a European project where EDRi is a partner, led by the
Schleswig-Holstein Data Protection Authority (Independent Centre for Privacy
Protection), within the ICT Policy Support Programme under the
Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP).
This PrivacyOS meeting was held under the patronage of the Chairman of the
ARGE DATEN – Privacy Austria Hans G. Zeger, who opened up the event pointing
out that “Freedom, fundamental rights and privacy are central terms for the
organisation of our information-society – not the other way round – we must
not subordinate our fundamental rights and our private life to an
omnipresent security-paranoia.”
With most of the presentations already available on the Project wiki, anyone
can follow the topics, balanced between from the first presentation on The
Role of DPAs in Raising Awareness about Data Protection, highlighting the
positive examples from Slovenia and Madrid DPAs, to the last presentation of
the second day when Eddan Katz from EDRi-member Electronic Frontier
Foundation (EFF) pointed out the lack of privacy ethics in some EU funded
Research projects. Eddan presented the example of the INDECT project which
aims to research on “Intelligent information system supporting observation,
searching and detection for security of citizens in urban environment”. The
project video on Youtube seems to support the privacy concerns if anyone
sees the comments.
Another highly concerning subject was presented by Filip Pospisil from
EDRi-member Iuridicum Remedium, that focused on the disturbing
implementation of the data protection principals in a number of Czech
medical databases.
With a title that could sound like one for a sports article “The Battle
between “MP3 Pirates and Privacy Buccaneers”, Cedric Laurant raised the
question on How to protect the privacy of DRM system users while protecting
copyright holders’ interests? By discussing another feature of the delicate
conflict between privacy and copyright, Cedric pointed to the not well known
DRMs’ threats for individual privacy, including of massive dissemination of
digital traces, loss of anonymity because of payment information disclosure
or data mining that opens the possibility of behavioural targeting. He also
suggested possible solutions, based on the change of the paradigm: Let DRMS
be based on authentication, not identification.
A practical example on solutions of Privacy on the Internet was given by
Andreas Lehner from EDRi member CCC Germany who made an easy to understand
introduction to Onion Routers & Overlay Networks, highlighting the JAP
project and especially the TOR Network.
The PrivacyOS event was also the place where the first EuroPrise Seal was
awarded to an Austrian company that developed an innovative solution to deal
with the CCTV’s privacy concerns by blurring the images of any human beings
appearing in the CCTV images.
PrivacyOS project
https://www.privacyos.eu/
Wiki PrivacyOS project
https://www.privacyos.eu/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Hans G. Zeger – Arge Daten – On the Way to Scoring Society
https://www.privacyos.eu/images/164_arc-677240-priva.pdf
Video presentation of Indect project
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl5g93m-SbA
European Privacy Seal for KiwiVision Privacy Protector
https://www.european-privacy-seal.eu/awarded-seals/de-090017