Marouen Bloggin' his Life

The session entitled “Security and Privacy Challenges for new Internet Applications: A Multi-stakeholder approach” during the IGF started with the presentation of the link between privacy, Technology and Globalisations by Anne Carblanc (OECD). To do so, she explained the new movement offered by new technologies, new trends in these technologies, the change of user’s and businesses and other organisations behaviour, legal policy frameworks that exists now, the limit of recent initiatives.

Joanna Shelton (Google) explained after the efforts made by Google in order to protect the privacy of their users within their services and especially by offering the option of using some of the services anonymously. She moved then to speak about the corporate social responsibility at the level of advertisement that her company is respecting. “The Users’ trust is the most important asset of Google” she added “A lot of miss information is circulated about what Google does with the information we collect”. Joanna made clear that the information collected is just technical and anonymous, used later just to improve the search results for future requests. “How do we protect the data ?” – “We are not a profiling company caring about the history of users so the storage time of data is limited”. “We are a company of engineers” she added before saying that Google has a 2-ears-cookies policy and a limited discloser of data so they do ‘never’ provide data to 3rd parties including governments and a ‘very strong’ network and security policies and architecture. At the end, she claimed that Google encourages and is keen to participate in any effort to establish global policies in the privacy area.

Simon (Privacy International)
Privacy International always believed since the beginning of internet that a catastrophe will happen sooner or later related to privacy. PI undertook few months ago a research concerning this issue at the corporate level and it appeared that Google was the worse privacy-respectful company among the 34 studied. “No communication or transparency”. A ‘bizarre’ meeting took place in Montreal after that involving these companies for the first time and was not politicized. The aim was to finally discuss the issue of privacy but what was discovered is that there isn’t any previous full understanding of the definition of the word privacy.

The next speaker also (Marie Georges - DPA) attacked smoothly companies like Google about the fake privacy-protection initiatives and compared the cookies information or search requests history to a similar analogy within libraries where keeping the list of consulted books for 2 years is inconceivable. Education and parliamentary programs are very important to explain the issue of privacy. The challenge is today to have world standards but the problem is that there are now no binding principles in the field.

Carlos (Argentina)
“The problem in Latin America is the balance between data protection and dissemination of judicial information”. The panellist gave the example after of a service provided in Argentina to consult online the previous legal cases for information needs but personal details were required to access to this service. A company started later dumping these data and publishing it online and offline and this created a breach in the privacy of citizens.

During the Q&A session, a dilemma was raised between interactivity level in web 2.0 which the aim and privacy. The moderator added that only 25% of Facebook users exploit the privacy tools.