A few times over the last year or so, you will have seen me refer to a series of Privacy Summit meetings which I've been helping to organise and run through the Liberty Alliance. So far, we've held summits in Berlin, Brussels, Washington DC, London, Basel, Yokohama, Tokyo and Stockholm, and we're currently planning the first 'return visit' - to Washington - and 'full circle' to Berlin.
Although we have deliberately tried to run summits in a variety of cultures and legislative contexts, the rationale has been consistent: that the identity and privacy issues which face us today are complex, multi-stakeholder problems to which no single stakeholder group has the answer. Our aim has been to create a peer-to-peer forum in which those diverse groups can be represented, and to find a way of factoring their input into a coherent picture of what digital identity and privacy are.
So, I'm delighted to be able to announce that the output report from the London and Basel summits is available online, and can be found here, on the Liberty Alliance website. You'll find the Berlin and Brussels reports on the same page, and of course you're welcome to browse those for completeness, but what I tried to achieve with the London/Basel document was to collect and present all the major lessons from the meetings up to that point, so that they are all in one relatively short document (the paper is 20 pages long, but the essence of it takes up just 11 pages).
What you will find in there is a small set of simple models for understanding what digital identity is, how it relates to identity data, and how that in turn relates to privacy. You will also find another set of conceptual models which explains why it can be difficult for a diverse set of stakeholders to have a sensible, coherent and productive discussion about the important topics - topics like trust, ownership of personal data, privacy policy and so on - and describes how we used the summit programme to find ways of overcoming that difficulty.
The further we go towards a world where distributed, digital representations of all our personal data are more and more prevalent, and where almost every aspect of public policy has some bearing on personal privacy and 'digital self-determination', the more certain I become that the concepts we set out in the Privacy Summit reports are vital ones. If policymakers, technologists, lawyers, academics, technologists, privacy advocates and citizens can sensibly discuss these questions and understand each other as they do so, then there's hope that tomorrow's identity and privacy solutions will strike the right balance between technology and policy, and between individual rights and 'functional convenience'. If, however, we cannot have that mutually understood conversation and strike that delicate balance, then I think it will always be to the detriment of one or more stakeholder groups - and I don't think that is in anyone's interest.
Please feel free to download, distribute and discuss the reports, and if you have any comments, questions, suggestions or protests, do get in touch...
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