Data Privacy Day Activities That Deserve Recognition

January 28 was international Data Privacy Day, which I blogged about a few times here, here, and here.
While the Intel site posted about many of the events that occurred, there were many more they missed.
Here are a few of them:


*&* Brent Carey at the Department of Justice, Victoria, Melbourne ran a Google Name Challenge competition. Participants typed their first & last names, the the quirkiest search results associated with their names won two movie tickets. What a fantastic idea!
Here is an excerpt from the write-up about the winning entry:

“Congratulations to [name of employee], the winner of the DOJ Google Name Challenge!
The employee did a Google name search of her name and found that there was a character called [by her name] on the old television series “Prisoner” who served a 10 day sentence for not paying a fine and had many other escapades. The employee has won two movie tickets for the quirkiest Google name search result!
A big thank you to all 77 participants. We had a lot of very good entries and it was a challenge in itself to decide on the winner.
Notable entries were from staff members who’s namesakes:
* are a NASA astronaut
* dated the actor Will Smith
* signed a statutory declaration in 1925
A staff member got a surprise about the lasting nature of information on the internet when she did a search of her name using the “I’m feeling lucky” option – finding a profile of herself from some years ago that she had forgotten about.”

*&* Greg Pemberton communicated that Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada celebrated Data Protection Day.

“This is the same as Data Privacy Day as started at Duke University last year but our Federal privacy commissioner is aligning us with the EU name for the event.
Our event is a lunch seminar with a guest speaker from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and also Dal’s own Information Security Officer. Our target audience is data-handling staff at the university plus privacy professionals from local government, business, and academia. Our aim is awareness and networking. Our privacy staff will meet with the local privacy professionals after the talks to discuss developing a privacy community, perhaps under the guidance of CAPAPA (Canadian Association of Professional Access and Privacy Administrators – capapa.org).”

And he also provided a follow-up:

“We had a fantastic turnout with ~280 people. The two main speakers were a perfect selection. They provided a balanced overview of our privacy legislation and issues, combined with practical, take-back-to-your-office-and-use tips, presented in a engaging and sometimes humourous way. We followed up with a survey that shows an overwhelmingly positive response.
We are already planning to expand to a 1/2 day conference format with more speakers and hands-on workshops for DPD 2010.”

*&* David Dann from New Zealand indicated that the activities were done as a joint effort of those on the ISACA-Wellington committee and other members. They are providing

“the Privacy Office with a useful privacy tool that will be available to the public in New Zealand this year. NZ is one of a number of countries that have effective privacy protection as a government supported goal. However the Privacy Office was short on specifics, so hence the need for our work. We narrowed our scope to data stored and data transmitted and some controls, such as soft and hard copy destruction and annonymization were not included. Most of our work has been completed and we will be finalizing it when we reconvene in February.”

Sounds like a great initiative!
*&* Lee Mathews provided a nice list of freebies at “20 Great Windows downloads for Data Privacy Day 2009!
*&* In recognition of Data Privacy Day, AT&T Services introduced The Privacy and Online Reputation Project in an effort to increase consumer awareness of privacy issues on the Internet.
What will Data Privacy Day 2010 bring?

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