from rpongsaj’s flickr cc license (thanks)
Today is International Privacy Day, and it is all over the blogosphere. This is a good thing. Generating awareness about privacy is goodness indeed.
But I find Eric’s position on Techcrunch that losing your privacy is the price to pay for on-line participation and collaboration rather depressing.
The more of our lives that we put online, the less privacy we have. It is as simple as that. And this is a problem that will just get worse over time. You cannot be fully engaged on social networks, blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed, and all the rest without opening yourself up to phishers, scammers, and identity thieves.
It is a false assumption, and a easy way out for software vendors and companies that process our data. Merely shifting the responsibility to private citizens is a cop-out. It is technological determinism of the most invidious kind.
Privacy is a fundamental human right, at least where I live. It is time that software makers, data processors of all kinds realise that, and build that into their product designs and business processes. It is also time that governments get more serious about enforcing the laws.
It took a few decades for the automotive industry to take responsibility for car safety, and it took a lot of government pressure and effort to bring down the accident deaths. There are of course still too many, but car safety has become a shared responsibility between manufacturers, government and drivers.
Data breaches in the US since January 2005 now total 252,276,206 records according to privacyrights.org. Just like pollution is a externality in manufacturing, privacy failure is an externality in a software. Users can’t fix it alone.
So yes, change your passwords, check your privacy settings, watch what you share. But it is now time that software makers and governments take privacy far more seriously. It is not a zero sum game, we can have a rewarding on-line experience without sacrificing privacy, but it will take a concerted effort from all the parties.
For vendors in the HR technology space, I’d be really interested to hear what you are doing to protect and enhance the privacy of the personal data that you process or enable the processing for. This is part of my research agenda this year.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Thomas Otter: International Data Privacy Day // Jan 28, 2009 at 5:55 pm
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2 Katitza // Jan 28, 2009 at 6:52 pm
The Public Voice coalition (http://www.thepublicvoice.org) is urging support for the Council of Europe Privacy Convention. At present, forty-one countries have ratified the Convention. The coalition is pushing for ratification in the countries that have not adopted the convention. In the United States, the US Privacy Coalition has proposed a resolution for the U.S. Senate. According to one source, the “Convention has withstood the test of time by being adaptive and fairly rigorous. Today the principles of this agreement are being examined for their applicability to the collection and processing of biometric data.”
Source: http://www.epic.org
3 28th January. International Data Privacy Day. - attopbusiness // Jan 28, 2009 at 9:32 pm
[...] It is a false assumption, and a easy way out for software vendors and companies that process our data . Merely shifting the responsibility to private citizens is a cop-out. It is technological determinism of the most invidious kind. Read more [...]
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