My lightning talk from the W3C privacy camp

1. Post Privacy
What should we do after the fail of
privacy?
@PeterKraker
#knowcenter

2. First off
• Fueled by previous discussions at #bcg10 and
#websci11
• The core of the problem is NOT the
information that you provide voluntarily
• This talk is intentionally provocative to start a
discussion

3. Why privacy will fail
• All data that exist about us is stored digitally
• Digital data is fugitive (easy to copy, hard to
protect)
• See: Wikileaks, Anonymous, various data
scandals near you
• Information can be inferred from other
sources (e.g. social graph)  jigsaw puzzle
effect

4. Therefore
 Data protection is a lost cause (and
sometimes not even the solution)
 Voluntarily provided information is only the
tip of the iceberg

5. My prediction
• Not all data will be apparantly visible
• But almost all data will be somehow
obtainable
• A grey market for personal data
• The important questions are not if or when
privacy will fail, but what we should do when
it happens

6. What will we do?
• What I DO NOT think will work:
– Let‘s just wait and see, society will be better if we
see that no one is whithout fail
• Concepts
– Information accountability (Weitzner et al.)
– What else?