That is the topic of a lecture by Daniel Weitzner at the University of Bergen today. I intend to blog about it, live or near live. Here’s the text announcing the lecture:
The Internet and World Wide Web have accelerated the free flow of information around the world, transforming lives of individuals and communities. While the benefits to freedom of expression are undeniable, challenges to privacy in this increasingly transparent and interconnected information space are daunting. Current legal and technical approaches to privacy tend to confuse privacy with security and put place undue emphasis on ability to limit access to personal information. This hide-it-or-lose-it perspective that dominates technical and public-policy approaches is an impractical strategy going forward. More importantly, it misunderstands the basic relationship between human behavior and social rules. The security driven approach to privacy assumes that people will violate all rules unless they are forcibly prevented from doing so, and that social rules are the product of a series of atomic negotiations regarding individual, contract-like agreements. This oversimplification has lead to technical infrastructure that is too brittle to support the evolution and maintenance of privacy and free expression rights online. We examine traditional approaches to information privacy rooted in the development of modern privacy law in the 1960s and 70s, and then ask how the fundamental goals of modern privacy policy can be achieved. Our new approach introduces the notion of Information Accountability. Information Accountability means the use of information should be transparent so it is possible to determine whether a particular use is appropriate under a given set of rules and that the system enables individuals and institutions to be held accountable for misuse. The Information Accountability will support effective privacy protection and is consistent with the highest values of freedom of expression.
