Personal Data - what the future holds

I attended a couple of very interesting talks on the future of privacy at the EEMA eID Interoperability conference in Brussels this week. Kim Cameron (Microsoft) suggested that by 2020 the best practice for business and governments will have moved beyond the current approach of data minimisation to positive data avoidance. This seems to match the suggestion of the UK's Deputy Information Commissioner last year that firms should view personal data as a "toxic liability". However Peter Hinssen (Across Technology) pointed out that Generation Y Internet users (those born since 1978) scatter personal information around the Internet as if they want to live in a global goldfish bowl.

The only way I can fit those two views together is to suggest that privacy will increasingly mean "I control what happens to my data" (as opposed to "nothing happens to my data", which is actually a definition of secrecy). So I may choose to post embarrassing pictures on Facebook, but woe betide any organisation or government that passes my data on to a third party. This challenges our current model of getting verified personal information from a third party (e.g. if you want to know if I have a degree ask my university) to move to a situation where an individual can make claims about themselves that have already been verified. There's an approximate real-world analogy in the use of drivers' licenses as proof of age: I carry with me a piece of plastic that proves to anyone I choose to show it to how old the DVLA think I am (if they know the not-very-complicated encoding!). But this is going to have to become a lot more sophisticated - Kim Cameron sketched out a possible device the size of a mobile phone that can both authenticate me and make third-party verified claims about me, both on-line and off-line. And it must prevent those who interrogate it from learning more either by direct information disclosure or aggregation of different queries. And it'll use near-field communications to act as a transportpass, cashcard, etc. If you think people are hooked on Blackberries or iPhones now, how much more dependent will we be on one of these?

Andrew Cormack- EEMA eID Interoperability Conference, Brussels, 16-17 March 2010