I am really excited to be going to the Youth Privacy Online Conference in September. Specifically, I am looking forward to hearing from speakers: Dr. Ann Cavoukian, Dr. Valerie Steeves (because we know how I disagree), Chris Kelly (Privacy Officer, Facebook) and Bruce Cowper (Microsoft). It’s a jam-packed day but it looks to be a good one!

A couple of weeks ago, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff spoke at the Eigth Annual U.S. Customs and Border Protection Trade Symposium (Nov 15). I’m not in the business of trade so a lot of it was a little over my head, but my ears always prick up whenever the word biometrics is mentioned. I’m still puzzled at the argument that collecting more information makes us all safer because I know from experience, that the more personal information I throw out into someone else’s data buckets, the less safe I feel.

Chertoff:

“And that insight is behind not only everything that we have done — in terms of collecting more information at the border, more precise targeting at the border, and raising our protections at the border — but it’s behind what the Prime Minister of Great Britain announced yesterday, as they’re moving to enhance their borders to what they call an e-Border system that will collect more information and more biometrics.”

I wonder how he feels about that statement now, considering the headline at Privacy.org last week:

UK Government Loses Personal Data of Almost Half Its Population

So far, the story is that personal information from 7 million some-odd families (including children) was downloaded and copied onto two Cds (encrypted). These were then sent into inter-office mail and subsequently lost. 25 million people have been put on alert and have been asked to watch for suspicious activity in their bank accounts.

If a government proves it cannot handle proper procedures when dealing with its citizens’ tax information, how can it justify collecting their biological information?

Okay, so I guess Myspace is not dead afterall. Sneaky devil had a trick up their sleeve last week when they announced Open Social with Google.

Here’s an interesting blog article by Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Ning).  He has some screengrabs of integration and gets into some more detail about the concept of Open Social and the implications of something of this magnetude for developers: “I think any web site going forward that wants maximum distribution across the largest number of users will have a single back-end, and then multiple sets of front-end pages.” I guess that’s nothing new if you’re developing your sites for WAP or Facebook already. Just add another to the list…right?

I’m excited to see this play out and curious on how Google and its crew are going to handle privacy.