Profiling, Surveillance Societies, and Privacy Advocacy Networks

This sounds like a lot of different things, but these topics were all covered by the presentations I was involved in at the Privacy&Security conference in Victoria/British Columbia over the last few days.

Colin Bennett and I shared a keynote on "Surveillance Societies and the emerging Anti-Surveillance Movement". I covered the "society" part, while Colin presented findings from his upcoming book on the privacy advocates. The slides are here.

I also introduced and moderated a panel with the nice title "Data Profiling - Do 'Where You Go' and 'What You Do' Become 'Who You Are'?". The slides are here.

The rest of the conference was pretty cool, with Lawrence Lessig and Simon Davies as featured keynote speakers, and other great folks like Daniel Solove also speaking. Biggest fun was the closing panel, where Richard Purcell grilled Chris Kelly, the chief privacy officer of Facebook. The conference attracts more than 1000 people nowadays, making it twice as big as the legendary "Computers, Freedom and Privacy" conference (to be fair, it is directed towards a slightly different audience - less geeks, more end-users in the government and private sector). I always like to come back here, even though it is quite a stretch from Europe. The weather could have been better this year, though.

Oh, and because so many people have asked me where to get the "Stasi 2.0" T-Shirts: You can order them here.