Beyond Secrecy: New Privacy Protection Strategies for Open Information Spaces

When the US government erected export-control barriers against the cryptographic technology used to ensure data confidentiality, a coalition of privacy advocates joined IT companies to get those barriers removed and enable widespread adoption of encryption for privacy protection. The most fundamental challenge to 20th century privacy laws is more social than technical - adding to the stream of personal data is a new wave of user-generated content in the form of blogs. Access control and security techniques will remain vital to privacy protection - access control is important for protecting sensitive information and, above all, preserving anonymity.