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The first Open Space conference of the PrivacyOS project was held in Strasbourg on 13-15 October 2008, in the European Parliament premises. PrivacyOS is a project funded under the European Commission's ICT Policy Support Programme, started on 1 June 2008 for a total duration of 24 months. Seventeen partners have joined forced in this project aiming at bringing together industry, SMEs, Government, Academia and Civil Society to foster development of privacy infrastructures for Europe. The project is coordinated by Jan Schallaböck and Katalin Polgar, both from the Schleswig-Holstein (Germany) Data Protection Authority.

The general objectives of PrivacyOS are to create a long-term collaboration in the thematic network and establish collective interfaces with other EU projects. Participants exchange research and best practices, and develop strategies and joint projects following four core policy goals: awareness-rising, enabling privacy on the Web, fostering privacy-friendly Identity Management, and stipulating research.

The Open Space conference format has proven a powerful mean to share participants' achievements, research and developments questions, and social concerns with respect to privacy. It also allowed to mix technical, legal and political approaches of privacy protection issues. It was a good venue to learn from other EU funded projects related to privacy, like the EuroPriSe (European privacy seal), PrimeLife, and others. This first edition was organized into 12 timeslots of 45mn each. Participants, including non project partners attending the conference, distributed the slots according to their proposed activities.

While most thematic sessions were introduced by one or two presentations, some timeslots took a more interactive form, like the one coordinated by the Oxford Internet Institute, a project partner, on 'Mapping the Database State': participants were invited to form three groups to discuss what central databases are setup in the framework of EU member states e-government developments.

Privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) were intensively discussed during the conference. Technical solutions were presented, like the SWIFT project consortium's proposal for identity management or the 'Silent Tag' project presented by Friendly Technologies Ltd, aiming at defining RFID chips that do not reply to generic interrogation, but only to identified and authenticated ones. Legal, ethical and political requirements were also discussed, following a presentation by Microsoft's Chief Privacy Advisor Caspar Bowden. Caspar Bowden's idea of interpreting article 8 of ECHR as a mandatory requirement for PETs implementation probably fall into technological determinism, but his suggestion to regulate data mining as a technology nicely converge with the concept of 'design liability' advocated by Law Professor Joel Reidenberg at the 2007 International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners in Montreal. The only remaining issue being that regulation implies control and such control is necessarily based on open access to the software to be examined..

As a PrivacyOS project partner, EDRI participated to this conference with a delegation of 4 persons representing its members FifF (Germany), IRIS (France), IuRe (Czech republic), and NNM (Germany). Two of them gave presentations: Ralf Bendrath (NNM) on "The new Privacy Movement - how to link & use the energy" and Meryem Marzouki (IRIS) on "ICTs and Security Policies: Trends and Needs for Specific Guarantees". Other EDRI members are also partners of this project on their own: Metamorphosis (Macedonia) and Quintessenz (Austria).

PrivacyOS is planning 3 other such conferences before the end of the project duration. Next conference will be held in Berlin, Germany, in April 2009.

PrivacyOS project (with conference presentations online)
http://www.privacyos.de

EDRI-gram: ENDitorial: Montreal Privacy Week: Terra Incognita Or Deja Vu? (10.10.2007)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number5.19/montreal-privacy-week

(Contribution by Meryem Marzouki - EDRi-member IRIS - France)