Whither Digital Privacy: Be afraid, be very afraid!

By: Sonny Zulhuda

A quick takeaway from a closed session on Students’ Digital Privacy yesterday at Le Meridien KL (June 7th, 2013), I’d like to share what California-based Jeff Gould presented.

The SafeGov.org CEO told the audience of their research findings, among others:

• The high significance of Facebook “Like” in profiling the identity of FB users;
• Real possibility of identifying a person via DNA reconstruction taken from a gum;
• Telco’s effort to provide some form of customer’s surveillance as their enhanced service;
• ISP’s role in protecting children privacy through contractual agreements with the users/subscribers

Many things shared which are not new issues but came with novel modus operandi. We just need to be vigilant.

The closed session was attended by representatives from Cybersecurity Malaysia, Parents Action Group for Education (PAGE), FOMCA, Microsoft Corp, India-based CUTS and some local universities. Mr. Rosly Yahil from Cybersecurity Malaysia spoke about various initiatives taken in Malaysian context in dealing with the issues.

During the Q&A session, I managed to share with the floor on several issues and development on data privacy in Malaysia:

* that both Parliament and Court are responding quite well in formulating laws on data privacy – though things could be done better;

* to protect children privacy, we need to reconsider the use of networked smart phones in school; and the way cyber centres and cyber cafes are regulated;

* and, on top of all those, we have to understand the digital privacy awareness is a generation work. This is because our children today belong to different genre: they are digital natives. And most of us in the industry now are migrants; digital migrants, that’s it.

It was an interesting event because we were looking at digital privacy issue more on children protection context. Nevertheless, it was more a sharing event than an action-oriented programme.

Oh, I just found a newspaper report on this event. Check it out here.