Setting the scene: PRIVACY IN THE AGE OF BIG DATA Gry Hasselbalch, March 2014, presentation at seminar, Bratislava.

Right to PRIVACY SURVEILLANCE… in one type of society

Article 8, ECHR (1950) – Right to respect for private and family life: “1.Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence. 2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right …….” (also in the convention of the child, article 16)

SURVEILLANCE requires a special effort

…IS ORDINARY in another type of society

Google processes 24 petabytes of data pr day (1 petabyte is approx. 20 million four drawer filing cabinets filled with text, mozy.com)

10 million photos are uploaded every hour on . FB-users push a ”like button” or a leave a comment three bilion times a day.

An hour of video is uploaded on Youtube every second

EU citizens' telecommunications data (telephone calls, SMS messages and emails made and received, and all websites visited) are required by law to be stored for 6-24 months

Snowden revelations of : e.g. NSA collected 200 million text messages worldwide on a daily basis (Guardian Channel4), hundreds of millions of e-mail-adresses and contact details from instant messenger-chatprogrammes worldwide (Washington Post), store 3 billion locations of mobiles daily (Washington Post), tap private data via Angry Bird (Guardian, NY Times). In one six-month period in 2008, the GCHQ collected webcam images from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally (Guardian) etc…

PRIVACY requires a special effort

some RESPONSES…

Legal/interstate

Fines to companies based on breach of privacy in Europe (processing a disproportionate amount of data, holding it for an undertermined period of time, failure to be clear about how data was used)

ECHR case law interpretations (recognition of potential of new tech for increased state surveillance, which require even greater safeguards to guarantee against risks of abuse)

Reform of the Data Protection Directive 1995

A revision of the US-EU Safe Harbour agreement (or even ”scrapping it”, Viviane Reding following Snowden revelations)

UN (La Rue ”surveillance” report, April 2013 and the ”right to privacy in the digital age resolution” Nov. 2013, ”Privacy in the digital age” Report, due sept. 2015)

Building a European Internet (European internet services that are ”walled off” from the US , Angela Merkel, feb. 2014)

Technical community

”WE NEED TO REBUILD TRUST IN THE INTERNET”

”THE INTERNET IS BROKEN”

Civil society

• Change in user patterns - Proliferation of use of privacy and anonymity tools

• Activism – e.g. The Day we Fight Back