I spent a day this week inside Google’s “Big Tent” – essentially a high profile event on privacy, hosted by Google, Privacy International and Index on Censorship, with an audience of the very cream of the British digital elite (and me).
I learnt a lot of things of which I’ll share the detail in the moment, but first I thought you should know the headlines:
- Eric Schmidt likes Chrome – he says it’s safe and fast.
- The Right Honourable Jeremy Hunt, UK Minister for Culture, Media and Sport (and responsible for this country’s legislation around internet use) says the government’s priorities for the internet are speed and mobile.
- In other news, the Pope _is_ catholic and bears _do_ defecate in the woods.
I mean seriously, is that the best we can do when it comes to pushing the boundaries of thought leadership around privacy in the digital society? Thankfully, the audience was mostly cynical hacks and privacy activists – you can imagine how well those points were received.
Anyhow, with that out of the way, there was in fact an incredible discussion throughout the day on a wide range of local and global topics around privacy and free speech, what follows below are the (admittedly blinkered) takeaways from the discussion that I want to explore further.
- It is clear that the law cannot keep pace with changes in technology. If I had a buck for every time someone on a panel said “technology has made an ass of the law” I would have precisely $16.73c. Although this point was universally agreed, there seemed to be no clear way forward to address this. Simon Davies from Privacy International had a particularly pragmatic solution – do nothing – effectively let it happen and let them learn. (The context for that point was the discussion around super-injunctions and Twitter in the UK).
- Organisation vs the individual. The focus remains to be on what can the “organisation” do to make an individual’s privacy better. Despite pushing from the audience (advocates from Mydex et al in particular) there was little interest in a discussion around what it would mean to put the individual in full control of their information.
- Collation vs Publication. There was still a desire to focus on the search engine’s role in collating the content (i.e. the index) vs the actual publisher of the content. I’m wondering why this point is so hard for people outside the industry to grasp. (see 4 below).
- Search is not the internet. Google’s Drummond put this well, “It’s a search engine, not the internet” but the conversation never followed suit. We should have been pushing Jeremy Hunt on the legal changes and leadership required from government i.e. you tell us which is the content we should remove and we’ll do it, the best example being religious extremist content – you want us to remove it, but you won’t tell us what is and what isn’t? Go fish. (My words).
- The “Right to be Forgotten” is a jingoistic phrase that not many understand. Common (mis)perception means that this should allow me to have control about anything about me on the internet. They forget of course that this conflicts with free speech. Where we need to move on this discussion is an understanding that individuals should have the right to remove data _they_ have posted about themselves, but not data that _others_ have posted about them.
- Privacy Boundaries. We established at least three clear boundaries around privacy that need to be explored further: Privacy vs Innovation (consensus was that privacy has _never_ impeded innovation), Privacy vs Free Speech (what’s private to you, may be free speech to me – who decides?), and Privacy vs Public Interest (are super-injunctions an expensive waste of time in a digital age).
Like Max Boyce, always said, “I know ‘cause I was there” – but what did _you_ think?
) Our collective success in addressing it properly will only come if we work together to understand the issues and build on the above principles to make it stick. 
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame them for doing this, but it’s a bit of a sledgehammer for what is essentially a walnut. The technology vendors have a big part to play in this, as do the various Governments and legislators that care about encryption standards, but importantly, the real challenge lies with you, dear reader, and it is one of data classification. There doesn’t seem to be much point in having a pervasive, granular data security solution if you don’t know which bits of your data are sensitive and which aren’t.
More than just today’s bandwagon, the current state of the global economy offers a real force for change. It is absolutely vital we understand how to harness this to our advantage rather than treating it as a constraint to progress. Being respectful that the current economic crisis has a devastating effect on many people’s lives, we need to be bold enough to avoid the mistakes that “easy” answers for cost reduction will bring – we’ll be looking at examples that help to unpick how we can make the biggest difference without sacrificing our future.
