Are times a-changing or has commerce got a tin ear?
Along with iappANZ Board members Julie Inman Grant, Peter Leonard and esteemed Chair Emma Hossack, I have just been to the annual IAPP Summit in Washington DC.
Well worth attending.
Some of the presentations are already online and more will follow. The video of the session with Becky Richards, the newly appointed Chief Privacy Officer for the National Security Agency, has also been posted.
I am sure that more is to follow as IAPP edits content and puts it online, so keep on checking these links.
For me, the standout session was the speech at the closing plenary by Julia Angwin, the journalist behind the “What they know” series in The Wall Street Journal. She has just authored “How I Quit Google” in Time magazine and “Has Privacy Become a Luxury Good?” in The New York Times and the book Dragnet Nation.
But she is not alone. See for example “Welcome to the counter-revolution” and the response to the Justdelete.me website which indicates how difficult it is to delete your profile from different websites along with help on how to do it.
So what do I read in Fairfax media today? “Coles reveals customers’ data is shared with third parties overseas“.
This ‘revelation’ deserves a bouquet by the way: to the Privacy Commissioner and the amendments to the Privacy Act which Privacy Professionals hardly need reminding come into effect on 12 March, now only days away.
There is nothing new in what Coles is doing.
What is new is that information about Coles data disclosures and overseas transfers is now part of its published privacy policy in response to the new requirements in the Australian Privacy Principles. A bouquet too, to Coles for its clear response to the new law.
After the IAPP Summit, I am left wondering about the person-in-the-street response to unconstrained data sharing and Big Data analytics.
We have been watching for the last 5-6 years a growing public realisation of the extent to which information about individuals is being collected, shared, analysed and acted upon and a growing sense of unease.
But commerce may not always be listening. Yet.
Privacy professionals clearly have a future.
[An earlier version of this blog appeared on the iappANZ LinkedIn group.]
Malcolm Crompton is the Founder and Lead Privacy Advisor of IIS Partners (IIS), a company that works with public and private sector organisations to build trust with customers through protecting their personal information.
