I attended Ovum’s briefing Information Privacy & Protection in London today.  One of the presentations included the use of a rather effective video below, to help illustrate the data security considerations and numbers of channels data could now leak through.

In addition to that, there was a very good presentation from Alexander Hanff from Privacy International (http://www.privacyinternational.org/). Without any slides or other media to assist, Aexander’s presentation was very good, getting his points across about current privacy considerations going beyond just the Data Protection Act, but also what is likely to happen with the update, EA efforts, the impact of privacy concerns such as those around smart advertising by solutions such as Phorm (which may well end up filling for Chapter 11). Although Privacy International is very much a campaigning organisation in the vain of EFF, the presentation I thought was well balanced and not a ‘big corporate bashing’ view.

I think the only issue I had that Alexander mentioned is during a question and answer session, is that when recruiting you should not take into consideration any public posting potential job candidates have made on a social networking site, he is correct to say a case (in Germany I think) may have made a president. If the post is public, I would argue it is fair game (and comparable if questionable statement was printed in the traditional media). If Alexander’s view is to stand, then the value of LinkedIn for example is dead in the water as you can’t use such a site to assist in recruitment. Yet LinkedIn is a way of advertising yourself as potentially approachable for work.

It is a shame that there doesn’t appear to be a podcast of a similar style presentation – as it would serve well as a wake up call, to those complaicent about privacy.