A big part of my research agenda in the Digital Safety theme at Constellation is privacy. And what a vexed topic it is! It's hard to even know how to talk about privacy. For many years, folks have covered privacy in more or less academic terms, drawing on sociology, politics and pop psychology, joining privacy to human rights, and crafting new various legal models.
Meanwhile the data breaches get worse, and most businesses have just bumped along.
When you think about it, it's obvious really: there's no such thing as perfect privacy. The real question is not about 'fundamental human rights' versus business, but rather, how can we optimise a swarm of competing interests around the value of information?
Privacy is emerging as one of the most critical and strategic of our information assets. If we treat privacy as an asset, instead of a burden, businesses can start to cut through this tough topic.
But here's an urgent issue. A recent regulatory development means privacy may just stop a lot of business getting done. It's the European Court of Justice decision to shut down the US-EU Safe Harbor arrangement.
The privacy Safe Harbor was a work-around negotiated by the Federal Trade Commission, allowing companies to send personal data from Europe into the US.
But the Safe Harbor is no more. It's been ruled unlawful. So it's big, big problem for European operations, many multinationals, and especially US cloud service providers.
At Constellation we've researched cloud geography and previously identified competitive opportunities for service providers to differentiate and compete on privacy. But now this is an urgent issue.
It's time American businesses stopped getting caught out by global privacy rulings. There shouldn't be too many surprises here, if you understand what data protection means internationally. Even the infamous "Right To Be Forgotten" ruling on Google's search engine - which strikes so many technologists as counter intuitive - was a rational and even predictable outcome of decades old data privacy law.
The leading edge of privacy is all about Big Data. And we aint seen nothin yet!
Look at artificial intelligence, Watson Health, intelligent personal assistants, hackable cars, and the Internet of Everything where everything is instrumented, and you see information assets multiplying exponentially. Privacy is actually just one part of this. It's another dimension of information, one that can add value, but not in a neat linear way. The interplay of privacy, utility, usability, efficiency, efficacy, security, scalability and so on is incredibly complex.
The broader issue is Digital Safety: safety for your customers, and safety for your business.