Privacy Identity Innovation 2010 (Pii2010) Conference

Last week I attended the Privacy Identity Innovation 2010 (Pii2010) Conference in downtown Seattle.

The conference was hosted by technology reporter Larry Magid, and featured a number of well-known Microsoft presenters, including Kim Cameron, Chief Architect of Identity in the Microsoft Identity and Security division; and Marc Davis, who was just hired to the position of partner architect for Microsoft's Online Services Division. Other notable presenters included Michael Fertik; Chris Hoofnagle; Jeff Jarvis; Christopher Wolf; Berin Szoka; Linda Criddle; Heather West; and Steve Wildstrom.

Pii2010 explored the future of digital privacy, identity and innovation, and how to strike a balance between protecting sensitive information and enabling new technologies and business models.

The conference started with an interesting interview by CNET's Declan McCullagh with Chris Kelly, former CPO of Facebook and unsuccessful candidate for California state Attorney General. Then Microsoft's newly-hired Marc Davis delivered the opening keynote with an interesting proposal for a "New Personal Data Stack and Ecosystem." Davis feels that government regulation is pressuring business to move closer to retaining less information, and this will eventually harm the economic value of information. His proposed solution is to restructure the Internet to protect that value and protect privacy by creating the missing infrastructure and ecosystem to make personal data bankable and tradable personal digital assets.

Blogger Jeff Jarvis then delivered another keynote on the benefits of publicness, which he said "makes and improves relationships, enables collaboration, builds trust, enables wisdom of the crowd, allows organization, and creates value."

After lunch, Larry Magid interviewed Michael Fertik of Reputation Defender. Fertik said that despite earlier failures, people indeed are willing to "pay for privacy."

Kim Cameron of Microsoft then delivered an interesting keynote on location privacy. Kim’s follow-up blog post is here.

Here’s a couple of interesting blog posts from those attending and presenting at Pii2010:

Larry Downes writes that, “what interested me most was just how emotional everyone gets at the mere mention of private information, or what is known in the legal trade as “personally-identifiable” information.”

Christopher Wolf accurately sums up the conference, “Lively" doesn't beging to describe the event, with audience members intervening at will and peppering the panelists with questions and "colorful" comments, It was a little like a blog come to life. One major take-away: there are widely divergent views on the role of government and regulation in protecting online privacy.”

--David Burt, CIPP, CISSP