via Caspar ...
Leading researchers in computer science, cryptography and law were recognised for their work at the intersection of technology and policy yesterday at the 6th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies.
“We wanted to support a prize that was judged by leading privacy technologists, for leading privacy technologists,” says Caspar Bowden, chief privacy advisor for Microsoft Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). “It’s great way for the best researchers to recognise and support the outstanding technical work of their peers.”
2006 PET Award Winner: “A Taxonomy of Privacy”
Daniel Solove [blog], an associate professor at the George Washington University Law School, won this year’s PET award with “A Taxonomy of Privacy”, a paper that attempts to identify privacy problems in a comprehensive and concrete manner.
Solove argues that privacy is not a unitary concept with uniform value — instead, privacy violations involve a variety of types of harmful or problematic activities. And although technology helps facilitate some of those activities, privacy problems are ultimately caused by the actions of people, businesses and governments — and a better understanding of what “privacy” really means is necessary to guide efforts to regulate them.
“Privacy is a concept in disarray,” Solove says. “Abstract incantations of ‘privacy’ are not nuanced enough to capture the problems involved. The law has often failed to adequately protect privacy, and privacy problems are frequently misconstrued or inconsistently recognised. Without an understanding of what the privacy problems are, how can privacy be addressed in a meaningful way?”
His taxonomy defines threats to privacy from the perspective of the individual, in four categories of potentially harmful activities — information collection, information processing, information dissemination and invasion. With the help of this more comprehensive taxonomy, Solove hopes that privacy considerations can be better recognised and balanced against opposing interests.
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