Designing Software With Privacy in Mind

dalektcalum writes "Dr. Ann Cavoukian, Canada's Information and Privacy Commissioner, recently gave a talk entitled Privacy by Design. The talk starts off by covering the basics of privacy, and privacy law, and then moves onto the important component: how to design software that properly protects users privacy. The majority of the talk is spent on design principles, but also examines specific technologies (such as Elliptical Curve Cryptography)." The site includes a flash video of the talk, but there are also several torrents for folks who want to avoid hammering their servers.

Comments

important points

[crazyirishhobo]

Privacy is really important, and watching this talk makes me realize, I have not being doing my part as a software developer to respect users privacy. Hell I log way too much information, just to make debugging a little easier on the off chance I have to debug it in production. I'd encoruage all software developers out there to watch this talk, and take its message to heart.

Re:Privacy

[RAMMS EIN]

So, perhaps you can explain to us all exactly why privacy is so important. The whole story, because I'm sure we've all seen bits and pieces before. What exactly is the risk in letting some organization know everything about everyone? Would the same risk exist if everybody knew everything about everyone? Is the only organization we need to be afraid of the government, or are there others? What are the different kinds of information we need to be concerned about, and what are their relative values? If you could gain a hundred dollars by it, what would you be willing to give up? A million dollars? Your living expenses covered for the rest of your life? What information would you never want to give up, no matter what the reward? Does it depend in any way on societal taboos? If so, isn't the real problem the taboos, not the availability of information? Wouldn't the taboos disappear once we knew, for example, how many people really had visited porn sites? If you did something illegal and the government knew, a malicious government could arrest you for it. A malicious government could also arrest you even if you had never done anything illegal. So what does it matter what the government knows? Etc.