Interviews with EU Data protection authorities

Earlier this year, the team working on the PHAEDRA II project (including researchers from VUB, UJI, Trilateral and GIODO) conducted interviews with representatives of (very nearly) all the European Member States data protection authorities. The aim of the interviews was to get the perspective of the authorities on the ongoing data protection reform process, better understand how they cooperate and collaborate with each other, and get some guidance on various activities planned under the PHAEDRA II project.  We collated the the interviews together into a summary report.

I'm currently working on a follow-up report that collates best practices in collaboration between DPAs in a number of topic areas (tools and platforms, communication with the public, investigations, etc). 

In related news, the book that collates together the presentations from the final conference of the first PHAEDRA project is now available, and can be downloaded from the project website.  http://www.phaedra-project.eu/reports/

There are physical copies in existence too. Check out the classical reference in that front cover.

Caspar Bowden

Privacy expert and activist Caspar Bowden died recently. There's been a real sense of shock and sadness amongst the privacy, data protection, digital rights communities that I'm connected to. I didn't know Caspar as well as others (there are some very fitting tributes) but I liked and respected him and his work.

I first met Caspar in the context of a Identity in the Information Society (IDIS) project workshop in Rome, where we ended up sitting next to each other at dinner. We spoke about the UK ID cards debate, which I'd been writing about for my PhD, but Caspar had been much more actively involved with. His insight on why particular UK news papers had adopted the various stances they did in the issue ran entirely against the grain of how I was thinking about fairly depersonalised, institutional "discourse". Since then, we've spoken in the context of other conferences and workshops and on twitter. He's on that short mental list that hovers in the back of your mind as you write acting as a quality check - "will Caspar think I'm an idiot if I write this?". I also always enjoyed it when Caspar asked a question at a conference (maybe because I wasn't ever on the receiving end).

 Sad loss.

CPDP 2015: Citizens' attitudes to privacy, surveillance and security

At the Computers Privacy and Data Protection conference this year, I was part of a panel we organised through the PRISMS project (along with SurPRISE, another similar project). I'm talking about the work we've been doing in PRISMS on developing a decision support tool to help security decision makers taking privacy into account in a structured way. There's a bunch of other CPDP panels also available on youtube.