Last Thursday and Friday a large group of academic privacy experts—as well as leading government, industry and advocacy participants—gathered at the Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC) in Berkeley, California to discuss and hold workshops on several new papers addressing key privacy issues. The conference was hosted by the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology and the George Washington University Law School. The event was co-chaired by FPF Advisory Board Members, Chris Hoofnagle of Berkeley Law School and Dan Solove of GW Law School. Additionally Danny Weitzner, the Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy gave the keynote address.
In his keynote speech, Mr. Weitzner discussed how to implement a privacy bill of rights and also his office’s goal of working towards a global interoperability of privacy regimes. He said that interoperability will result in global coordinated and cooperative enforcement. In response to a question from FPF founder and co-chair Christopher Wolf, Mr. Weitzner said that if, as is likely, privacy legislation does not pass this year — and he was more optimistic about data security laws passing – “Plan B” is to push industry to follow the best Fair Information Practices detailed in the Commerce Green Paper.
FPF’s co-chairs, Wolf and Jules Polonetsky also participated in the PLSC discussions of the various privacy papers. In addition, Polonetsky presented a paper he co-authored with Omer Tene, entitled “To Track or ‘Do Not Track’: Advancing Transparency and Individual Control in Online Behavioral Advertising,” which discussed the range of policy considerations around user control of information collected about them for targeted advertising. Chris Wolf moderated the discussion about a paper by Colette Vogele & Erica Johnstone entitled, “Without My Consent, describing a new web site focused on the removal of and remedies for revealing photographs posted without a person’s consent.”
At the PLSC dinner on Thursday night, continuing in the spirit of privacy scholarship, FPF announced its ongoing open call for papers for our annual “Privacy Papers for Policy Makers.”
FPF invites privacy scholars and authors to submit papers to be considered for FPF’s second edition of “Privacy Papers for Policy Makers.” Our goal is to highlight important research and analytical work on a variety of privacy topics for policy makers. Specifically, we want to showcase papers that analyze current and emerging privacy issues and either propose achievable short-term solutions, or propose new means of analysis that could lead to solutions.
If you have not yet submitted your paper, or know of any one who has yet to submit, please click here for more details about the review process and submission requirements. The paper submission deadline is July 15, 2011.