Michael Nentwich (Institute of Technology Assessment (ITA) speaking

A universal feature of modern life is the invasion of privacy that occurs every day and in a variety of forms. Invasive surveillance activities are carried out in the name of preventing terrorism and stopping fraud. Crime control has become synonymous with surveillance technologies, information technologies and databases. The boundaries of public and private life have become blurred, and privacy has become compromised in the name of protecting the public. At the same time, users of social networks and Web 2.0 services voluntarily give away their information – supposedly to other users, but whether they know it or not, they are also giving it to companies and whoever is interested in the data freely available on the Web. Google and Facebook’s power are being discussed more and more in the media, opening up a discourse about companies and citizens’ handling of personal information.

The idea of a right to privacy has been a long-debated issue. For some, privacy protection can only occur through the development of transparent standards; for others, privacy is already an outdated concept. Attempts to ensure privacy protection have focused on the notion of personal data and legal frameworks. More recently, privacy-enhancing technologies have become an important technological advance, although they have not been widely adopted by the online community. It is widely acknowledged that existing legal frameworks fall short in terms of impacting on organisational practices. Thus the question dealt with in this session: how can privacy be protected in the future Internet world and how can the protection keep up with the dynamic technological developments.

The abstracts of the session can be read here.

Presentations of the session:

• Michael  Friedewald

Introduction

• S. Strauss/ M. Nentwich

Social network sites, privacy and the blurring boundary between public and private spaces

• S. Sevignani/ Chr. Fuchs

Privacy in the Internet: Commodity vs. common good

• L.M. Hilty/ B. Oertel/ M. Wölk

Identifying, tracking and tracing. From geographic space to cyberspace and back

• P. Schütz/ M.Friedewald

Privacy by design for biometric authentication solutions

• J. Pridmore

Personal data ecosystems and our ”digital exhaust”: User centric services as a reformulation of privacy