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Deutsch: Workshop der Kommission über datenschutzfreundliche Technologien

The European Commission held a workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) on 12 November 2009. The event was supposed to be on the interim report from London Economics on the economic impact of PETs but ended up by being considerably broader.

Dirk Van Rooy (Head of Sector, Trust and Security) gave an overview of the work that DG Information Society had done on privacy issues, also within the context of the Framework Programmes. He drew attention to the European Commission Communication covering eID infrastructure and explained that this issue is being discussed currently with Member States and that further initiatives are planned.

London Economics were asked to present their initial findings after only four months of their nine month project - which was probably too early. It appeared from their presentation that they have not yet found a definition for PETs adapted to the specific context of this research. As a result, several participants in the workshop challenged the consultants on their approach.

In the second session, John Borking gave an overview of issues surrounding the take-up of PETs by industry, explaining the positive and negative elements leading to and mitigating against PETs usage. In essence, he appeared to argue that the cost/benefit analysis needs to be rebalanced in order to give industry a clearer view of the potential costs of, for example, data leaks.

Ari Schwartz from the Center for Democracy and Technology made a brief presentation of the history of P3P, describing what it does and does not do and the overblown claims that were sometimes made about it. He provided a very interesting quotation from Citibank on the issue:

"There is a concern that P3P would let ordinary users see, in full gory detail, how their personal information might be misused by less trusted or responsible web site operators. Such knowledge may cause users to resist giving out information altogether."

Yoram Hacohen from the Israeli DPA presented a project that he had been involved with in a previous job, where the electoral roll was made available on CD to political parties. The system had numerous, complex PETs that worked well but, once the election was over, the competent national authority failed to collect the CDs from the parties and the data ended up by becoming public. He said that the next Data Protection Commissioners' conference would take place in Israel in 2010 where "privacy by design" and PETs would be prioritised as topics.

Workshop on Economic Benefits of PETs (12.11.2009)
http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/fsj/privacy/news/docs/workshop_econom...

White Paper: Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) & Citibank
http://www.w3.org/P3P/Lee_Speyer.html

EC Communication - A Strategy for ICT R&D and Innovation in Europe: Raising the Game (13.03.2009)
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2009:0116:FI...

(contribution by Joe McNamee - EDRi)