I occasionally post to the Cutter Consortium blog, and the recent topics there have involved privacy.
The viewpoints expressed by some of the others on the Cutter site intrigued, and certainly surprised, me. I’ve noticed a trend over the past couple of years for a large portion of the CTOs I speak with, along with others who work very exclusively with technology, to express the opinion that the possibility of privacy with current and technology is impossible. Especially the technology vendors, and those technology experts working for them on new software products. I’ve had some very well-known software CTOs basically laugh as they tell me that privacy is dead, and that technology cannot be constructed to protect privacy.
As you can see from the opinions I’ve expressed on this blog, such as here, along with the Cutter blog posting I mentioned earlier, I do not believe this at all. I believe that, not only can technology be architected to protect privacy, but if the effort and thoughtfulness is just exerted, that more new types of technologies can be created to add to the current privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) choices that exist, such as encryption.
But what do *YOU* my readers think? I’d really like to know.
So I decided to use a new capability I have to do polling on my blog site! Look to the right of the screen as you scroll down a bit and you will see my very simple poll about privacy. From everything I’ve seen and researched about this poll capability, there will be no personally identifiable information (PII) collected when you do this, but the general area of where your ISP is located will be noted so that we can see from where in the world our poll participants come.
Please submit your opinion; I really want to know what you think! Am I being too optimistic to think that the majority of people, beyond pure technologists, really do believe privacy can, and should, be built into software and systems?
I’m very interested in getting as many opinions tallied as possible and seeing what a large number of people think; aren’t you interested to know also? It’s very possible that I may be surprised at what most people visiting my site say about privacy. Of course I won’t be able to tell if the respondants are “pure” technologists or not, but hopefully we’ll get a good mix of folks.
Tags: awareness and training, compliance, encryption, Information Security, IT compliance, policies and procedures, privacy, privacy poll, risk management