Most people have an opinion about privacy these days, from Scott McNealy’s memorable throw away line “You have zero privacy. Get over it”, to the fierce concerns many people have around how much information Google stores about each and every one of us. Well, I certainly feel it’s important and it was great to have the opportunity to meet many other like-minded people at the Australian Privacy Awards dinner last night.
Special Minister of State and Cabinet Secretary Senator Joe Ludwig started the night with a good overview of the state of play, with many people and organisations struggling to come to terms with technology advances such as social networking that have such far-reaching effects on privacy. He mentioned the need for balancing government transparency and protecting personal information so many times that I felt like jumping up and saying “Hey, that’s just what we do!!”
It certainly was an honour to receive the “highly commended” award in our category on Space-Time Research’s behalf and I’d like to thank the Office for the Privacy Commissioner for giving us the opportunity to be part of the whole event, and to meet and talk with so many people who work in this area. However, what I really wanted to mention in this post was a couple of award winners that I found particularly interesting.
Dr Roger Clarke was a worthy winner of the Australian Privacy Medal. Dr Clarke used his speech to remind the audience that there was a lot of real work that needed to be done, and that that he felt his medal was a little tarnished, because some people including some of the award winners were essentially just window dressing (not his terms - but I think that was the gist of it), and not really applying a genuine effort to promote privacy. Rooms are typically politely quiet when people give speeches but I think in this case it was a pregnant, slightly awkward kind of quiet.
There’s some great information on Dr Roger Clarke’s website about information privacy. In fact, I came across one note where he mentioned data protection that has made me rethink why we are using this term. He makes a really good point that many laws focus on data protection, where the focus is protecting data about people. As he explains, the real issue is to protect the people and you do that by considering what information might be derived from the data, rather than just protecting the data itself. Very good point.
Another winner I really liked was the Victorian Department of Justice (and not just because they are our customer). Who would have thought promoting privacy practices could be so fun or entertaining? Well, the people at Department of Justice certainly do. As an example, their most recent idea is to put together a radio show based on the X-Files concept. It will be called the P-files, with some really witty variations on Scully and Mulder’s names that have totally slipped my mind. One way or another, they plan to slip in the line “is that a USB stick in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?” It was really refreshing to hear about their work and I do hope they have inspired many people there to take an equally innovative and enthusiastic response not just to promoting privacy practices, but to many other aspects of their work. I’m sure that even Dr Clarke would agree that they were really deserving winners.
Until 18 mths ago, I’d never heard of the office of the Privacy Commissioner. Now I know a whole community of people who are working to help Australians find the right balance and have some control of what parts of their lives are public knowledge. Privacy may not seem like an important issue to many in this age of Facebook and with the attitudes of Gen Y but I think Roger summed it up very nicely in his speech: “Privacy doesn’t matter until it does.”
