Questions from a nephew to an uncle
My nephew, Zac, is completing a dissertation on privacy for his final degree work. He asked me six questions as part of this study.
Q) At its most basic level what does the right to privacy mean to you, what are its constituents?
A) To me, the right to privacy implies my right to manage and control access to information about me in order that is not used harmfully against me by any individual or organisation.
Q) Is this concept of privacy transferable to the realm of cyberspace? Are our real world rights to privacy equivalent our digital world rights?
A) Yes, they are. Or at least they should be. For reasons which are apparent, privacy rights are much harder to monitor and enforce in the digital world than they are in the real world where as we know privacy protection is not that well managed anyway.
Q) Should privacy be for sale or protected by statute? Do you favour the US system of market correction or the European system of regulation and protection?
A) The instinctive reaction is to say that, if done really well, either would do! But in reality what will happen and what is probably preferable will be a mixture of the two with a preference towards the European approach even though it tends to be fragmented across different member states of the EU.
Q) It has been argued by many that we live in a culture we trade-off our privacy for convenience and luxury, does the nature of the internet exacerbate this issue, and if so do you feel it will be a permanent feature within the privacy debate?
A) The Internet and networking in general certainly do exacerbate the tendency towards convenience and ‘ease of use’ which mitigates against some of the natural controls over privacy infringement in the non-digital world.
Governments get together
At the end of last month, eema's two day European e-ID card conference created a real buzz. With over 80 people in attendance and 21 speakers, this was a great opportunity to cover the waterfront in terms of what is happening - and interestingly what is not happening - in terms of national electronic identity cards across Europe from Estonia to Italy, from Austria to Belgium.
Key presenters were Reinhard Posch, CIO from Digital Austria (Austria are the current holders of the EU presidency) and Katherine Courtney from the UK Home Office who emphasised the need to strike the right balance between the citizen and the state. This is of course in all transactions and harks back to the musings of Plato, but it is a particularly sensitive issue at the moment especially with respect to personal digital identity.
What is about to have a major impact on the citizens of Europe and their digital interactions was revealed in the projection from the estimated 10 million users today, mainly in Austria, Belgium, Estonia and Italy to a projected 300 million e-IDs issued by 2015 including the mandated use by 50 million UK citizens in 2013.
However a fascinating couterpoint to this was the revelation that many of these card systems are not interoperable! Hence eema is proposing to host an e-ID card interoperability challenge at this summer's eema conference in Barcelona on 15-16 June. Should be worth going to!
- Posted by davidg on 13/03/2006.
- 3 comments
Three elephants, two jungles and a mouse
Last week's saw the long-awaited announcement by IBM and Novell of the Higgins project which is part of the open source Eclipse application development environment, favoured by both companies. Initiated at Harvard's Berkman Center, Higgins is the application developer's window on to the world of identity data and so, in a convoluted kind of way, is being seen as a competitor to Microsoft's much-discussed Infocard initiative, due out with the Vista release later this year. Infocard starts with the perspective of the user and a user interface and as a consequence seeks a so-called 'meta-system' to interact with or through. Conceptually this could or should be an open paradigm for interoperability. In practice, because Microsoft is ahead of the game, it's not - yet anyway. The Eclipse approach comes at the same problem - putting the control of identity into the hands of the individual - from a different, though not necessarily conflicting, perspective.
Through its use of adaptors, Higgins is touted as the meeting place for every standards-based protocol or format available to date and, through the jungle clearings on both sides of the argument, lurks both LDAP and WS-Security which IBM and Microsoft have worked on closely, and almost exclusively, for several years for the benefit of the rest of the industry in the face of repeated criticisms of isolationism and the like.
So are we faced with two competing camps for the next round in the progress of the ultimate solution for identity? Simple answer is that it's not the right question to ask and both sets of parties would (and have) applauded the other party's initiatives. Time will tell in what is reminiscent of the concept of 'fighting for peace'.
And the mouse? Higgins is named after the Tasmanian long-tailed mouse which reflects the Web 2.0 theory of the "long tail" of micro-markets that complement traditional industries. So to squeak.
- Posted by davidg on 06/03/2006.
- 2 comments
Introduction
I first introduced myself to the concept of personal digital identity through some work I was doing in the context of the so-called Global Directory Forum, a collaboration between eema and The Open Group, in 2001. For the purposes of a paper entitled 'Directories on the Internet', it became clear as I proceeded through the history of what had been done up until that time, to establish public/private interconnected directories from X.500 to UDDI, that it wasn't working convincingly. It also dawned on me that the vital missing ingredient came from the perspective of the individual who would be referred to in directory terms as the object or the entry. When you enumerate all the different scenarios and players involved in creating the vast array of directory systems that exist in the world, it's really not surprising it's a mess or that anyone or any group should wish to avoid tackling it.
What makes identity a hot topic today is that all the problems that have been brewing for the last twenty years are finally getting their head of steam. The noise you can hear is the sound of the kettle lid rattling.
- Posted by davidg on 03/03/2006.
- 3 comments
