Held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Privacy and Data Protection Commissioners, the event was cybercasted, live blogged and tweted in order to be available to any Internet user interested in the privacy topics.
The conference had 5 different sessions, with two keynote speakers - Mr. Stavros Lambrinidis, Vice President, European Parliament and Mr. Peter Hustinx, European Data Protection Supervisor (Netherlands).
The first session Privacy and Human Rights: The Year in Review presented several privacy issues from 2009 from different parts of the globe. The European status was presented by Meryem Merzouki from EDRi-member IRIS, France that highlighted the new threats brought by the Stockholm programme or the different police databases with high-level privacy intrusion. There was a specific interest from the audience on the status of EDVIGE 2.0. Meryem confirmed that the civil society will react to the new police file, while Peter Schaar has underlined that "Edvige is a horror database for us, because it includes many persons that did not breach any laws - they are just 'risky persons'."
The latest Privacy and Human Rights Report that covers 80 states was launched with this occasion by Ms. Katitza Rodriguez, Electronic Privacy Information Center.
The second session - Privacy Activism: Major Campaigns was kicked off by a lively presentation by EDRi-member Mr. Ralf Bendrath who explained what is Privacy Activism 2.0. Mixing open structures, viral marketing, pop culture, privacy issues with a healthy dose of fun was the perfect recipe for the biggest campaigns - biggest demonstration ever against surveillance in Germany known in the entire world as Freedom not Fear. Ms. Willemiem Bax from Consumer Organization BEUC highlighted the consumers actions for the protection of their digital rights, while David Rodríguez presented a creative local campaign against CCTVs in the neighbourhood of Lavapies, Madrid.
"Your Data in the Cloud: What if it Rains? " was the inspired title of the third session. EDRi's President Andreas Krisch pointed out with an image from the computers in the 60s and 70s that the new technological developments do not change that much and we should address more seriously the security aspects of cloud computing. He suggested as ideas to be included in global privacy standards in cloud computing: data breach notification, data minimisation as well as responsibility for IT infrastructures introduce in the market (see RFID).
Moving even more in depth on the global privacy issues, there were discussions on the transborder data flows. Eddan Katz from EFF showed the real problems of the Safer Harbour privacy agreement between US and EU, including the fact that it doesn't cover non-profits, because FTC oversight on US side is only for companies. Gus Hossein from Privacy International bluntly declared that we should stop using transborder data flows as a Trojan horse for asking for data protection legislation in developing countries. He insisted that just having a data protection act is not enough and we should focus on capacity building for this countries.
The last session presented the Civil society declaration: Global Privacy Standards for a Global World, with the other representatives at the final panel (Ms. Jennifer Stoddart, Privacy Commissioner, Canada, Mr. Jacob Kohnstamm, EU Article 29 Group Vice-Chairman and Mr. Rafael García Gozalo from the Spanish DPA) openly supporting the Declaration.
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number7.21/privacy-standards-global
