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Private Lives?

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The social value of privacy

This Demos collection will highlight new thinking about privacy in the UK, and seek to address the future challenges of the privacy agenda in an increasingly open society.

Global privacy standards?

Posted by Peter Bradwell at 2:54pm on Friday, 14th September 2007
Data and information about us, for reasons fair, foul or just opaque, travels across nations and continents as an almost necessary by-product of whatever it is that we call the information society. But how can we be sure about what that means for who sees that personal information, and how it is used?

Google's Peter Fleischer is talking about this today in a speech at a UNESCO conference on ethics and human rights in the information society. He's arguing that we should develop some global privacy standards that can help us manage in this complex international environment for personal information. Who should be responsible for it? Would countries retain the right to set their own standards? Where would accountabiltiy lie?

It's an interesting set of problems from the perspective of a an information handler with some compelling challenges on their hands. The speech will be part of our forthcoming collection of essays on privacy, to be published in early November.

Comments

1
It's an interesting set of questions, and I think the analogy to human rights is a good one. You have the equivalent of Amnesty in something like the EFF. But the chances are that if anything like global privacy standards get off the ground (which seems extremely remote at the moment; and it's pretty far down the list of things liberals would like the Chinese government to start doing) that you will then inevitably get the equivalent of Guantanamo Bay - zones deliberately ring-fenced to suspend those rights.
Posted by Will Davies  at 3:29pm on Friday, 14th September 2007

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