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Deutsch: Dritte PrivacyOS-Veranstaltung: Mehr Datenschutz, erhöhtes Bewusstsei...

Continuing the privacy events after the huge success of the 11th Austrian Big Brother Awards that took place in the evening of 25 October 2009, the Third PrivacyOS Conference took place in Vienna on 26-27 October 2009, focusing on sharing information and best practices among experts in the field, but also on raising awareness in privacy. .

There was a large variety of presentations in an Open Space format from participants arriving from 10 countries and representing diverse sectors: industry, SMEs, government, academia or civil society.

The event is part of a European project where EDRi is a partner, led by the Schleswig-Holstein Data Protection Authority (Independent Centre for Privacy Protection), within the ICT Policy Support Programme under the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP).

This PrivacyOS meeting was held under the patronage of the Chairman of the ARGE DATEN - Privacy Austria Hans G. Zeger, who opened up the event pointing out that "Freedom, fundamental rights and privacy are central terms for the organisation of our information-society - not the other way round - we must not subordinate our fundamental rights and our private life to an omnipresent security-paranoia."

With most of the presentations already available on the Project wiki, anyone can follow the topics, balanced between from the first presentation on The Role of DPAs in Raising Awareness about Data Protection, highlighting the positive examples from Slovenia and Madrid DPAs, to the last presentation of the second day when Eddan Katz from EDRi-member Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) pointed out the lack of privacy ethics in some EU funded Research projects. Eddan presented the example of the INDECT project which aims to research on "Intelligent information system supporting observation, searching and detection for security of citizens in urban environment". The project video on Youtube seems to support the privacy concerns if anyone sees the comments.

Another highly concerning subject was presented by Filip Pospisil from EDRi-member Iuridicum Remedium, that focused on the disturbing implementation of the data protection principals in a number of Czech medical databases.

With a title that could sound like one for a sports article "The Battle between "MP3 Pirates and Privacy Buccaneers", Cedric Laurant raised the question on How to protect the privacy of DRM system users while protecting copyright holders' interests? By discussing another feature of the delicate conflict between privacy and copyright, Cedric pointed to the not well known DRMs' threats for individual privacy, including of massive dissemination of digital traces, loss of anonymity because of payment information disclosure or data mining that opens the possibility of behavioural targeting. He also suggested possible solutions, based on the change of the paradigm: Let DRMS be based on authentication, not identification.

A practical example on solutions of Privacy on the Internet was given by Andreas Lehner from EDRi member CCC Germany who made an easy to understand introduction to Onion Routers & Overlay Networks, highlighting the JAP project and especially the TOR Network.

The PrivacyOS event was also the place where the first EuroPrise Seal was awarded to an Austrian company that developed an innovative solution to deal with the CCTV's privacy concerns by blurring the images of any human beings appearing in the CCTV images.

PrivacyOS project
https://www.privacyos.eu/

Wiki PrivacyOS project
https://www.privacyos.eu/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Hans G. Zeger - Arge Daten - On the Way to Scoring Society
https://www.privacyos.eu/images/164_arc-677240-priva.pdf

Video presentation of Indect project
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl5g93m-SbA

European Privacy Seal for KiwiVision Privacy Protector
https://www.european-privacy-seal.eu/awarded-seals/de-090017