Transparency: now for government requests too

This is my personal blog, and I try hard to keep my Google work-life out of it. I try to resist the temptation to turn this into a running daily diary of privacy at Google, since that would be a different blog. But sometimes, Google launches something that is so important in privacy terms that I can't resist some personal comments.

The most recent launch answers a basic question: how many requests does Google get from governments for user data? Take a look at the map and the country-by-country data.

This is an important step on the road to transparency. Users should be able to see their own data. And they should be able to get maximum information too about who else can see their data, including, perhaps more important than anyone else, governments. I haven't seen any other company provide this level of transparency. Hopefully some others will be inspired to do this too.

The data deluge

One of the most provocative things a privacy geek can say is "data minimization is dying". Data minimization has been one of the foundations of traditional privacy-think. The idea is basic and appealing: privacy is better protected when less data is collected, when less data is shared, when data is kept for shorter periods of time. This explains the endless debates in privacy circles about how many months computer or phone logs or passenger-name records should be retained, as though a numbers game about retention was the key issue in privacy. It isn't, but a debate over numbers is simple and appealing, and can be relayed by the press in a simple manner.

But whether you like it or not, we're entering an age of data ubiquity. Clearly, technology trends are making this possible, computing power, storage capacity, Internet transmissions have all allowed this to happen. And like all trends in technology, it will have good and bad applications: the same ease of transmission of data that enables billions of people to access information from around the globe makes it easy to transmit malicious viruses as well.

Statistics about the scale of the data deluge are indeed sobering, even if they reflect scales that human brains can't really understand. There are over a trillion web pages now, growing by billions per day. I read that there are now over 40 billion photos on Facebook alone. YouTube users upload over 24 hours of video every minute. The Economist reported that the total amount of data in the world is growing by 60% per year. No matter where you turn on the web, the scale of data growth is stunning. Even if you find concrete steps to advance data minimization, you're just taking a few drops out of the ocean of the data deluge.

There's no doubt that the Information Age is doing a lot of great stuff with this data deluge. It's also true that this data deluge is posing unprecedented challenges to privacy. I've struggled with this conundrum for many years. I don't think there's a better solution than trying to create maximum transparency and putting control over data back into people's hands, as best as possible. Trying to stop the data deluge is either Sisyphean or chimerical. But trying to decide on behalf of people also undermines the fundamental dignity and choice that each individual should be able to exercize over his/her own data. Of course, not all people can or will exercize responsible control over their own data. But putting transparency and control into users' hands is much like democracy. It fundamentally empowers the individual to make choices and trade-offs about data: making choices between data benefits and privacy. It's not perfect, of course, but it's still better than putting someone else (like governments or companies) in charge of those decisions. I think companies, governments and privacy professionals should define success foremost by whether we contribute to putting people in charge of their own data. As Churchill said: It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

To tweet or to delete?

How would you resolve the conflict between the cultural imperative to archive human knowledge and the privacy imperative to delete some of it? To put this in perspective, compare the approaches of the US Library of Congress and the French Senate.

As reported by The New York Times, the "the Library of Congress, the 210-year-old guardian of knowledge and cultural history, ...will archive the collected works of Twitter, the blogging service, whose users currently send a daily flood of 55 million messages, all that contain 140 or fewer characters."

Meanwhile, the French Senate is moving in the opposite direction, as it explores a law to legislate "the right to be forgotten". The French Senate has been considering a proposed law which would amend the current data protection legislation to include, among other things, a broader right for individuals to insist on deletion of their personal information. The proposed law in France would require organisations to delete personal information after a specified length of time or when requested by the individual concerned.

To take another example, this time from Germany. A court there was recently asked to consider a legal action by two convicted murderers (now released from prison) seeking to force Wikipedia to remove their names from an article documenting their criminal past. While the case is ongoing (as far as I know), the German language version of Wikipedia has agreed to remove the names from the article in question. The two men are now seeking to force the Wikipedia Foundation to delete their names from the English language version as well.

Well, I think we'll be blogging and tweeting about this dilemma for some time, knowing that our tweets will be archived. I testified to French Senators recently that I could never support a privacy "right to be forgotten" that amounted to censorship. I wonder if they tweet in the French Senate, and if they know their tweets are being archived in the US Library of Congress?

Which photos reveal "sensitive" personal data?

There are hundreds of billions of photos and videos online now. As a matter of common sense and common courtesy, users should not upload pictures or videos of other people to hosting platforms without their consent. Moreover, users should take particular care when uploading photos which might reveal "sensitive" personal data?

Privacy laws provide lots of extra legal protections to "sensitive" personal data. Trying to define what is "sensitive" is no easy task. The EU Data Protection Directive uses this definition: "personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade-union membership, and the processing of data concerning health or sex life."

But what is "sensitive personal data" in the context of photos or videos? In one extreme logical sense, any photo of a person reveals "racial or ethnic origin". A picture of my face reveals that I am a middle-aged Caucasian male of European descent, revealing my racial or ethnic origin, as well as the fact that I usually wear glasses, indicative of the health issue of myopia. Does that mean that every photo or video of a person should be treated according to the legal standards of "sensitive personal data"? Most people would assume that is neither possible nor desirable, since it could require the explicit consent of data subjects (in writing, in some countries, and subject to prior approval by the DPA, in other countries) before their photos could be uploaded to the web. Clearly, this is not the way that the web works today, and indeed it would be completely unworkable.

I've discussed this issue with many people, in particular in the context of photos taken on public streets. Some privacy regulators have shared their (rather extreme) opinion with me that a photo or video of someone sitting in a wheel chair, or even someone walking in the vicinity of a hospital, should be treated as "sensitive", since it might reveal "health" status. Similarly, a photograph of a person appearing on a street near a mosque should be treated as "sensitive" since it might reveal "religious beliefs". But it's hard for me to imagine a crude solution like drawing a no-photograph zone around mosques and hospitals. It also seems wrong to me to apply the legal standard of "sensitive" personal data to situations which merely increase the likelihood of associations. So, many people take a more nuanced approach. A photo or video often lacks the context to make it meaningful: a photograph of myself in front of a cathedral doesn't automatically mean that I'm Catholic, and isn't necessarily revealing "sensitive" personal data. A photograph of people praying there maybe does. But does the fact that such photos are taken in a public place, and are widely considered banal, change the analysis of whether they should fit into the more restrictive categories of "sensitive" personal data?

All in all, it's very hard to know where to draw the lines. Hopefully, people who take photos and videos will be respectful of the very serious issues that the legal concept of "sensitive" personal data" is meant to protect. But the lines separating "sensitive" from "normal" personal data will usually be fuzzy and contextual. Think of the simple example of a photo of two people holding hands. Is this indicative of their sexual orientation, and hence, "sensitive" personal data, or really, just two people holding hands? I suppose it depends on the context. This is not something that photo or video hosting platforms or software filters are able to know. Ultimately, this is all about protecting people's human dignity, and that fundamentally, is a human judgment.

Privacy Audits

In theory, privacy audits are a sensible and useful thing. Regardless of whether they're conducted internally or externally, they can provide insights into data handling systems, identify shortcomings, and help prioritize resources. They can provide external, independent validation of compliance with privacy laws and contractual commitments. And they can be a useful source of transparency. Sometimes, they're even mandated by privacy law, e.g., in some controller-processor outsourcing arrangements under EU data protection rules. Considering how many good reasons there are to conduct privacy audits, it's a bit of a mystery to me why there isn't more of an industry to provide them. Indeed, if you were looking to hire external experts to conduct privacy audits, and if you asked me for a recommendation, well, I'd be kind of stuck to give you a name. I've asked a bunch of my peers at other companies too, and privately, they're stumped too.

Lots of people purport to be able do privacy audits. Law firms, accounting firms, consulting firms are all ready to sell this service, at sometimes astronomical costs, but in practice, if you ask around amongst people who have tried to hire them, you often hear people complain about high-priced pay-as-you-learn tutorials for junior professionals. There are also a few "low-cost" versions floating around, but they are often rudimentary checklists (e.g., "do you have a written privacy policy in place? yes, check!") etc. There must be more room for the happy middle ground between the super-high-cost customized audit and the self-audit checklist models.

So, here's a business idea. Why don't some enterprising people work to establish a privacy auditing business, combining some deep technical understanding with process rigor, offer the service at a competitive cost, and help fill a vacuum? Almost everyone in the profession whom I know agrees that privacy audits are, in theory, a useful tool for privacy hygiene, but in practice, it's hard to find the right level of professional service.

There seems to be a clear market failing here. Over time, surely, the idea of privacy audits will become more integrated into good privacy practice. Whoever can figure out how to provide this service will be contributing to the privacy profession and probably end up making a lot of money. Good luck!

A new chance to get the Working Party to work better?

I'm delighted to see a new Chairman, Jacob Kohnstamm, assume the helm at the Working Party, which is the group of all of Europe's national Data Protection Authorities, created to try to achieve common approaches to privacy across Europe. Mr. Kohnstamm is a privacy leader whom I've known for years, and whom I greatly admire, even when we find ourselves on the opposite sides of the debate. I'm confident he'll provide new leadership and relevance at the Working Party. I also think it's healthy for European institutions to break away from alternating franco-german leadership, which has so dominated the Working Party over many years.

As a privacy professional, people sometimes ask me why I take the Working Party seriously, and why I would want to see it play a greater role in privacy matters in Europe? The answer is simple: with all its institutional flaws, any body that contributes to a more harmonized data protection across Europe is better than the alternative, with 27 different approaches and inconsistent cacophony. Since the Working Party is the best instrument we've got in Europe to try to do things in a coherent way, I think it's worth taking a moment to make suggestions about how it could work better. My comments are strictly focused on only one aspect of its role, namely, the extent to which it interacts with the private sector in a semi-regulatory context. My critiques are offered in a spirit of constructive feedback.

So, what are the key issues that deserve attention to make the Working Party work better in the future?

Public Transparency: the Working Party operates behind closed doors. It rarely involves outsiders in its deliberations. It almost never publishes draft opinions for external review, and rarely (if ever) opens its meetings to the public. As far as I know, it never publishes the range of consenting/dissenting views with its opinions, and it publishes little more than a summary agenda and adopted Opinions. I strongly believe that transparent government is good government, and the Working Party is simply not transparent today.

Accountability and Review: the Working Party's opinions are not "binding" and therefore have never, to my knowledge, been subject to judicial review. Sometimes Working Party opinions make sense, sometimes not. Sometimes they're insightful, sometimes they're gibberish. External, objective, academic, technical, maybe even judicial review, is much needed.

Technical expertise: The Working Party has many times embarked on issues which turn on Internet technical architecture. There is not enough technical expertise at the Working Party level, which is unsurprising, considering that the members generally come from political or administrative backgrounds. But to have well-informed discussion about Internet regulation, a foundation of technical knowledge must be in place, or must be provided from the outside.

Confidentiality: To deal with confidential business matters in a semi-regulatory context, any regulatory body needs to be able to respect business secrets submitted to it. Maintaining confidentiality has not been a strong point of the Working Party, given that its documents are routinely distributed amongst 27 countries. But leaks damage the ability of the Working Party to be effective.

Speed: In tech circles, things move fast. This is an innovation business, after all. But a discussion with the Working Party can often take years, with rather stilted exchanges of letters, each exchange punctuated by multi-month pauses. Surely, there must be a faster, less formalistic, way to collaborate.

All in all, these critiques are meant to be constructive. I think privacy would be well-served by a more realistic and collaborative dialogue between the Working Party and industry. The old Working Party made some progress, but there's room for more. I'm hopeful about the future.

Billions of photos online, Billions of privacy offenders?

With the proliferation of Internet platforms for user-generated content, people are increasingly seeing examples where one person's right to freedom of expression may infringe someone else's right to privacy, and vice-versa. If I upload my holiday pictures to the Internet, taken from a public place, and if they capture you lounging by your pool, does my freedom of expression trump your right to privacy, or the other way around? Whatever you think, there are already billions of such photos online and publicly accessible.

Both freedom of expression and privacy are fundamental human rights. But those rights are not both equally enforced, protected or policed. There are literally thousands of data protection bureaucrats in Europe whose job is to enforce European data protection regulations. As far as I can tell, there is not a single government official in all of Europe whose sole job is to do the same for freedom of expression. Curious, no?

As I go to privacy-centric conferences where people invariably talk about the problems and risks of social networking sites, I'm often the odd guy out who seems to think that they're also precious platforms for freedom of expression. Lots of guys in power lecture about how lives or careers or futures are jeopardized by a single embarrassing photo posted to a platform.

Well, I'm not so sure. I was thinking about what this guy showed when he was young, and he just got elected Senator, so maybe things are changing.

A privacy regulator in Europe told me the other day that he thought it was a data protection violation for anyone to post a photo online if it captured someone's face or property without their consent. I asked him whether he thought this restricted the right to freedom of expression. He didn't seem to understand the question.

Grazie! for your support

I'm thinking about Italy a lot these days. Many of you have expressed your support, and I'm gratified by your concern and your solidarity.

I see this case has prompted an important debate and passionate expressions of support for the principles of freedom of expression that I have always felt are at stake in this prosecution. We'll get the Judge's written opinion within 90 days of last week's verdict, so probably around mid-May. Until then it's hard to speculate about his precise legal reasoning, even if the implications of this conviction are already being widely discussed in terms of the potential liability of employees working for internet platforms that host user-generated content. As for me, I'm not really at liberty to comment much publicly, because, anything I say about it can (and has!) been used against me.

Many thanks to you, my many friends in the privacy community who have reached out to me. Grazie!

Today's astonishing verdict in Milan

Google has already reacted to today's astonishing verdict in Milan. I'd like to add a few personal words.

I will vigorously appeal today's verdict in Milan. The judge has decided I am criminally responsible for the actions of some Italian teenagers who uploaded a reprehensible video to Google Video. I knew nothing about the video until after it was removed by Google in compliance with European and Italian law. I was very saddened by the plight of the boy in the video, not least as I have devoted my professional life to preserving and protecting personal privacy rights. Despite this a public prosecutor in Milan has spent 3 years investigating, indicting and successfully prosecuting me and 2 other Google colleagues.

This ruling also sets a very dangerous precedent. If company employees like me can be held criminally liable for any video on a hosting platform, when they had absolutely nothing to do with the video in question, then our liability is unlimited. The decision today therefore raises broader questions like the continued operation of many Internet platforms that are the essential foundations of freedom of expression in the digital age. I recognize that I am just a pawn in a larger battle of forces, but I remain confident that today’s ruling will be over-turned on appeal.

Austrian insights

I've been thinking about the conundrum of trying to fit all of the words data into two random black-and-white categories: "personal" data or "non-personal" data, or personally-identifiable information and non-PII if you prefer. The reason we're all trying to do this is because most of the world's legal regimes create these two categories, and only these two categories, even if it's obvious that many things sit uncomfortably in the gray zone between them. The big privacy debates generally turn on these gray-zone categories, which identify some things about an individual (e.g., speaks Spanish), but don't identify an actual human being. Think of the privacy debates around IP addresses, cookies, RFIDs etc, and you see that the debates can't be settled using only these two categories.

I think the way forward is the creation of a third-category, something we could call "indirectly identifiable data". Interestingly, Austrian law has already done that. Here are some insights into the Austrian law, the Austrian Federal Act concerning the Protection of Personal Data (Datenschutzgesetz 2000). Under Austrian Law, data is ‘only indirectly personal’ for a controller, a processor or recipient of a transmission when ‘the Data relate to the subject in such a manner that the controller, processor or recipient of a transmission cannot establish the identity of the data subject by legal means." In other words, the identity of the individual can be retraced but not by legal means.

When introducing the concept of indirectly personal data, the Austrian legislators referred on the face of the bill before Parliament to Article 2 (a) of the Directive and, in particular, to the phrase ‘…an identifiable person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly…’. This suggests that a deliberate decision was made to distinguish between persons who can be identified directly (and for which the full force of the Austrian Law applies) and those persons who can only be identified indirectly – hence the concept of indirectly personal data. In the eyes of the legislators, indirectly personal data did not require the full range of protection that directly personal data required. There may additionally have been commercial and practical reasons considered by the legislators why to require organisations to treat indirectly personal data in the same way as directly personal data made no sense.

This is how I've been told Austrian Law treats indirectly personal data below:

Section	Provision
8 (2)	Use of only indirectly personal data shall not constitute an infringement of the fundamental interest in secrecy that deserves protection under s. 1 (1).
9 (1) (2)	Use of sensitive data does not infringe interests in secrecy deserving protection only and exclusively if data are used only in indirectly personal form.
12 (3)	Transborder data exchange shall not require authorisation if data are transferred or committed that are only indirectly personal to the recipient
17 (2)	There is no requirement to notify the Data Protection Commission where the data application only contains indirectly personal data.
24 (4)	There is no duty to provide information to data subjects when collecting data where such data is not subject to notification under s. 17 i.e. this would include the use of indirectly personal data.
29	The rights granted under s. 26 – 28 cannot be exercised insofar as only indirectly personal data are used. Section 26: right of access Section 27: right of rectification/ erasure Section 28: right to object
46 (1)	For the purpose of scientific or statistical research projects where the goal is not to obtain results in a form relating to specific data subjects, the controller shall have the right to use all data that are only indirectly personal for the controller.
46 (5)	Where the use of data in a form which permits identification of data subjects is legal for purposes of scientific research or statistics, the data shall be coded without delay so that the data subjects are no longer identifiable if specific phases of scientific or statistic work can be performed with indirectly personal data only

All of this is interesting, because I think privacy law will never adapt to the nuances of the real world if the entire real world has to be fit into only two black and white categories. Finding a legal category to deal with the gray zone is essential to getting privacy laws right, and the Austrian model is one of the most promising I've seen.

An American in Paris

A year ago, in the early phases of thinking about how or whether to suggest revisions to the European Data Protection Directive, the European Commission created a little "group of experts" to provide ideas. This unpaid group was formed after a public call for applications, and had no mandate other than to produce some ideas. Expert groups are a common process at the Commission. Since I'm very interested in this topic, and since I represent a technical/global/Internet perspective on things, I was happy to apply and even happier to be accepted to join it. But the group was disbanded after only one meeting, as reported here.

As an American who has lived in Paris for many years, I was more than a little startled to see French politicians launch a campaign to get the European Commission to disband this group because it contained..."Americans". Naturally, I thought it was odd to hear this anti-American rhetoric applied to me. It's hard to find an American more Francophile than me. One of the other guys on the experts' group was an American of German origin who has lived in Brussels for many years and is universally recognized as one of the world's great legal experts on European data protection law.

Of course, it was distasteful for me to hear French government officials engaging in conventional French political rhetoric against "Americans", but this was the first time in my professional life that I was the explicit target of it. I don't like xenophobia in any guise, even if it's just public posturing. But I also remind myself that anti-Americanism has long been one of the common threads of European data protection rhetoric, such as the endless posturing of the EU Parliament on SWIFT.

Privately, things are different. Privately, these same French audiences regularly invite me to discussions or hearings on privacy issues. In recent months, I've had separate meetings with committees focusing on modernizing privacy laws in the French Senate, with French politicians, and with the French Data Protection Agency. Privately, there's a very thoughtful debate underway in many French government circles on these important questions, and I'm privileged to be invited to participate in them. Privately, we all understand that the privacy debate has become global, and only global solutions will work in the long run.

Anyway, here are some excellent ideas from the European Privacy Officers Forum about what needs to be modernized in this window of review of increasingly obsolete European privacy laws. Had our "experts' group" not been disbanded, we might have made similar recommendations...

The new rules for cookies in Europe

Despite some inaccurate press, the revised text of the ePrivacy directive does not require an opt-in for cookies. However, the text of the revised directive may be misunderstood especially if the preamble of the new directive is not transposed into national law. So national governments need to take great care when implementing the new law, in order not to jeopardise the development of the Internet and the information society.

In its Article 5(3), the ePrivacy directive outlines strong safeguards to protect users from unwanted software such as adware, junk, or even viruses and spyware, requiring software vendors to seek their consent.

For cookies, the EU legislation's preamble specifically says that the control settings in a browser are sufficient to comply with the consent requirement. Even for cookies that cannot be controlled by browsers – for example, Silverlight and Flash cookies – the new law also recognises that the settings of specific control panels satisfy the consent requirement.

The directive’s new preamble contributes to legal certainty by clarifying that websites can rely on browser controls and similar applications to define the acceptance of cookies. This was not clear under the current law.

Member States will have 18 months to transpose the new ePrivacy directive into national law (i.e. until April 2011). It's important they take great care so as to avoid misinterpretations that would create new barriers to the EU's internal market, confuse consumers, and ultimately put Europe at a competitive disadvantage.

So now, if a user configures his or her browser to accept only cookies from certain websites, or automatically delete cookies when closing a browser, these settings will be sufficient as expressing the wish of the user. Websites technologically rely on browsers and other applications for cookie management. The current directive had a blind spot in this regard as it did not explicitly recognise cookie control tools as a way to comply with the law. The new directive clarifies this, but it's important that implementation into national laws follows the letter and spirit of this goal.

Photos to the Web

I'm always amazed how many photos I find on the Web, of friends, family or myself, that none of us knew were there. Because things on the Web, in particular, photos, can last forever, forgetfulness is one of the big new themes in the privacy debate, particularly in Europe. There's lots of discussion about how to re-introduce a human concept of memory/forgetfulness/evanescence into a technical world of computers and websites and the Internet. I'll be joining a conference on this theme next week in Brussels.

I also joined a French government-sponsored conference on this theme recently in Paris. At the conference, much was said about the risks to people to having their photos posted online, without their knowledge or consent. With some sense of irony, I noticed a bunch of photos of me were published from that conference without my knowledge or consent, like the one here, in the online photo album of the Minister, no less,...I don't mind, and I would have happily consented, but it does make an interesting point, and I re-posted it to this blog, but that was my choice. If thoughtful people sitting in a conference about the problems of posting photos online are taking photos of people at the conference and posting them online, all without their knowledge or consent, well, maybe the sociology of online photo-sharing has developed beyond the state of the debate.

Happy 80th Birthday, Dad!

The "adequacy" regime is inadequate

There are many people in Europe who would rather eat their “chapeau” than admit that non-European countries like the United States might have adequate privacy protection, based on long-standing cultural or ideological bias. In my opinion, it’s the European “adequacy” regime that has become inadequate in today’s world. It’s near the top of my list of things that need to be modernized in European privacy law. It’s a political/bureaucratic fiction that some countries provide “adequate” data protection, while others don’t, because the decision is based on criteria that have almost nothing to do with the level of data protection on the ground, in the real world. A country can’t be deemed “adequate” if it doesn’t have an EU-style data protection authority. But the idea is ludicrous to me that privacy somehow couldn’t be protected in countries without such an agency, and in fact, the vast majority of countries in the world don’t have such an agency. And whatever labels are applied, the reality, in the age of the Internet, is that data is flowing around the globe. To take one topical example, cyber attacks do not respect borders, and take no note of whether or not a target is based in a country with “adequate” data protection.

So, recently, Israel and the Principality of Andorra have been added to the EU list of “adequate” countries. They join other countries already on the list, including: Argentina, Canada, Guernsey, Jersey, the Isle of Man, and Switzerland. Stop to read that list again, and ask yourself, really, this is the global list of “adequate” countries outside the EU? Really?

In privacy terms, what’s the right way forward for the future? As I’ve said before, follow the Canadian model, and make any company/government that collects personal data responsible and accountable for protecting it, regardless of where it happens to process it. If it can’t protect data adequately in a particular country, it shouldn’t send it there. If a company decides it can adequately protect its data in Japan, but not in Bulgaria, so be it, even if EU law would suggest the contrary. Common sense should prevail for the sake of privacy.

At the beginning of each year, I make a resolution to visit at least two new countries a year. If I’m lucky, I’ll have my wish and get to visit Andorra and Israel this year. They’re both on my adequacy list.

Privacy Officers with a French accent

Since I’m based in France, I’ve recently been appointed as Google’s “Correspondant” for data protection with the French Data Protection Authority, the CNIL. The profession of privacy officers is generally less developed in Europe than the US, and indeed, the position of “correspondant” was first created in France in 2004. Like many things in France, even this private-sector role is defined and guided by the government, in the long French tradition of dirigisme:

“From now on, local authorities, public services and associations are allowed to appoint a "Correspondant Informatique et Libertés" (CIL). It is a major innovation in the application of the law, as prior pedagogy and advice are emphasized. Indeed, the data controller which appoints a CIL is exempted, in most cases, from the notification process to the CNIL. The CIL has the duty to ascertain that the information system of the organization will expand without harming the rights of the users, clients and employees.”

As a privacy professional, I’m very excited by anything that supports the development of meaningful empowerment and development for the profession. As long as the role of Correspondant avoids the trap of becoming a purely administrative function, I think it could prove to become a serious contribution to the growth of this profession in Europe.

Practice makes perfect

I recently got away for a few days to play tennis in Florida. I left with a clear conscience, thinking that 2009 was a good year at Google in terms of privacy tools.

Google launched three major industry-leading privacy initiatives that implemented the key privacy principles of transparency and choice -- interest-based advertising, the data liberation front, and Google Dashboard.

It's a great tennis facility, on Key Biscayne, with grass courts, no less. Someone builds and maintains a grass court in that unlikely climate, and it must be a lot of work. And people pay a lot of money to live in "privacy", which usually means living in a place, like Key Biscayne, where they are secluded and protected from other people. So, now that there are online privacy tools, like the ones I just mentioned, I wonder if people will really use them more. I mean, to play tennis, you have to run and serve and swing. To protect your privacy, you should hustle a little too. Someone else can build the grass court, but it's up to you to play.

Watching people walk down the street

It's just snowed in Paris, and I'm looking out my window, watching the children and the dogs play. Almost everyone walking down avenue Foch seems to be speaking on a cell phone. I doubt many of them are thinking about how their location data is being captured, stored or used.

EU countries began passing the Data Retention laws mandated by a European Directive. That means that massive databases of communications logs will now be collected and stored by communications service providers across Europe for 6 months to 2 years, for police and law enforcement purposes (France, for example, chose 12 months). This is the largest police surveillance database ever mandated in the history of humanity to date. The year ahead will define how all this is going to work in practice: who will be able to access them, for what purposes, under what controls, how should this work in a cross-border context, etc. Will other countries follow Europe down this path? For most people, I imagine, the most sensitive aspect of this is the idea that their physical movements can be tracked by the police over long periods of time.

But the mobile revolution is just starting. Think for a moment about the intersection of mobile and face recognition software. For some years, in small controlled contexts, the police have already been using face recognition software to find individuals in a crowd. Online photo albums already offer some face recognition software in the contexts of particular albums, or in the contexts of social networking sites: take a look at face.com. But reflect on the prospect of face recognition software that could be used from any Internet-connected smart phone that can photograph a face and return instant search results. Google already announced the launch of Goggles without face recognition and acknowledged the privacy concerns in applying similar technologies to identifiable human faces. There's a lot of work to do to think through the privacy design of image recognition software applied to faces. The more I think about it, the more complicated it gets.

The web is going mobile, and as Internet apps go mobile too, location-aware services will explode in 2010 and beyond. That means that location data will be captured and used. Location privacy will become a key new issue in the mainstream in the year ahead. It's been around for years in cell phones, of course, but the issues will grow exponentially in the age of proliferating third-party location aware apps. It's one thing for you to know (or be dimly aware) that your cell phone company knows where you are based on your cell phone's location, it's quite another to have a plethora of third-party apps know that too.

Mobile is where the next generation of tough privacy issues will come, I muse, as I watch people walk down a Paris street that hasn't changed much in a hundred years.

DC: discussing privacy in public

I spent a few days in Washington DC in December. While I was there, I slipped into a public workshop hosted by the Federal Trade Commission on privacy. The content of the workshop has already been covered: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/12/07/ftc-takes-on-online-privacy/

Coming from Europe, I found this sort of transparency and public consultation by a privacy regulator novel and refreshing. The FTC regularly holds public workshops, where it invites stakeholders from many different sectors (academia, advocacy, government, private sector) to discuss problems in privacy and potential regulatory responses to them. This is meant to help the FTC staff understand the issues that it will grapple with. Moreover, the FTC often issues its guidelines in draft form, for the sake of public review and comment, before finalizing them, as it has done with its privacy guidelines for online behavioral advertising principles: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/02/behavad.shtm

So, in my mind, I couldn't help but contrast all this with the practices of one of the world's other great bodies of privacy regulators, the EU Working Party. The Working Party has never, to my knowledge, held a public workshop. It has never opened any of its meetings to the public, and indeed, it is very rare that anyone from outside the closed world of Data Protection Authorities to be invited to attend one of its meetings. It publishes almost no information about its agendas, other than a few sentences to describe its annual work program. It never publishes its opinions in draft form for public review and comment before finalizing them. And finally, since it only issues "opinions", rather than enforceable decisions, its work has never, to my knowledge, been subject to judicial review. Seeing the transparency of the Federal Trade Commission's public workshop in action made me appreciate the benefits of transparent and open government.

On the sidewalk in Milan

I was relaxing with a glass of chianti watching The Bourne Ultimatum on tv. The shadowy authorities use surveillance technologies to try to track down Jason Bourne.

So, I'm no Jason Bourne. Back in January 2008, as I've blogged before, I was surrounded on a sidewalk in Milan in front of the ancient University by 5 Italian policemen. Many confused thoughts went through my head at that moment, as I'm sure you can imagine: fear, confusion, surprise, indignation. But also, a nagging question: how did these policemen know that I would walk down this sidewalk at this moment in a foreign city and how did they recognize me on a crowded city sidewalk?

As anyone who's checked into a hotel in Italy knows, the first thing that Reception asks you for is a passport. This is also true in most European countries. It's for the police. There is zero transparency or choice in this process: no one I've ever met knows where this data goes or how long it's kept or what it's used for. Needless to say, if you're sharing a room with another person, the police will know this too. You do not have the option of checking into your hotel room anonymously.

In my case in Milan, I don't think there was any great use of police surveillance technology. I'm guessing the police were waiting on the sidewalk because there had been some minor press coverage before the privacy conference where I was scheduled to speak. I assume they downloaded a photo of me from the web and knew from the conference program roughly when I'd be arriving. Why five policemen were sent, I have no clue. Were they expecting me to make a run for it, like Jason Bourne?

According to independent reports, Italy leads the world with more wiretaps per capita than any other country. Wiretaps in the age of the cell phone now include location information.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/07/wiretap_trends_ss8/

I've always enjoyed the freedom of walking down the streets of foreign cities with the liberating sense of anonymity. I feel a little less free now. I hope technology will find a way to put users in control of their location information. I'm off somewhere else now, but come to think of it, I'd rather you didn't know where.