Drumbeat CPH—Privacy

(added from http://jeppekruse.posterous.com/notes-from-fridays-drumbeat-event-in-copenhag) - thx, Henrik

Notes from Friday's Drumbeat event in Copenhagen

Friday saw a get-together of around 50 people for Drumbeat Copenhagen in an old stable in the meatpacking district. I had the opportunity to present the--as then--untitled privacy project (I've since then named it Distributed Privacy Settings) to six groups of kind and inquiring people. This is a great set-up for getting a lot of feedback, which was obviously what the project needed since it had never been presented to anyone ever before.

Most of the feedback centered around the ambitiousness of the project and, while people were generally positive, some questioned the feasibility of the idea altogether. @claus suggested building a service that would act more like a hivemind privacy space watchdog in an initial phase, to raise awareness and hopefully help connect all the privacy geeks out there before we take the next step.

My main concern for the Distributed Privacy Project has been the challenge of drawing up one all-encompassing model for defining privacy, what with all the different models and interactions of the various social network services out there. During the discussions another obvious point kept surfacing: Privacy should really be about mapping relations between people rather than setting restrictions on what technology can do for you.

This notion was first introduced by @rankenberg, and at a later session with @claus @moltke @vonhaller @rankenberg and a few others, we discussed the possibility of defining privacy this way. While it would be a prerequisite for the Distributed Privacy Project, it should carry enough work for a Drumbeat project of its own. Any takers?