Privacy seminars are like London buses

[Dave Birch] You wait ages then two come along at once. After going along to the DBERR seminar, I’d spoken at the BCS Information Security Specialist Group “Privacy Day”. I remember that, by coincidence, shortly after having woken up that morning, I heard a story on the Today programme (by forum friend Rory Cellan-Jones) about privacy. I thought he might be priming the nation for my presentation, but it turns out that the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, had that very day released his annual report. In the report he called the number of companies, government departments and public bodies breaching data protection rules “horrifying”.

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Thinking about it, if there was a key take-away idea from the BCS Privacy Day for me, it was Tom Ilube of Garlik who made a quick aside that had me thinking all day. He said that in the physical world, the shredder is the ideal consumer product. It says clearly on the box that it will do something about identity theft — and it does, in a fairly narrow way, but it does something — and when you get it home it’s easy to use because you just plug it in and then start feeding in old credit card statements. And, critically, it makes a reassuring noise while it shreds and you get to see the shreddings (is that a word?) when it’s finished. So what would be the cyber equivalent? This is presumably one of the things that an entrepreneur like Tom is looking at: that is, not only how to implement the relevant identity management but how to make the package work in the consumers frame of reference.

In case anyone is even vaguely interested, my presentation on the recommendations of the Royal Academy of Engineering Working Group is here…