Monday, May 19, 2008

Privacy discussion (US vs EU)

A couple of weeks ago, Georgetown University hosted a panel discussion on the differences between privacy issues in the US and the EU. This is a fascinating issue given that as people travel more and more, and governments try to protect their borders via information discovery, the implications to the loss of privacy are quite large. Although I think this panel spent too much time mentioning a few issues (passenger list disclosure, if corp. aggregation or govt. aggregation of data is more concerning and the differences between US and EU privacy law, much of the electronic privacy law issues (like if IP addresses are Personally identifiable Information (PII)) was left out. Of course in a one hour discussion you can’t really even begin to touch all the privacy issues but it seems a shame that such a great panel of experts was stuck on the surface of many issues and didn’t dig that deep into many. None the less, it’s a interesting listen if you are interested in privacy issues and the law.

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