Through Ian Fletcher of Burton: Peter Fleischer of Google is now facing criminal charges for failing to prevent the publication of a defamatory video on Google's video site - taking it down after 24 hours was not sufficient. While this is a somewhat extreme case, I fully expect an increasing number of civil and criminal cases filed against companies and government agencies for failing to protect the privacy of data principals: In the U.S. the efforts to standardize patient's electronic health records and federate access to this data will invriably lead to some cases of unauthorized disclosure. Europe has already had a decent share of privacy violations lately, but the effects have so far been manageable.

Going forward we as a society need to coordinate data access much better than we have so far, thus it starts making sense to star talking about privacy management as a separate discipline in corporate IT and process management. Privacy management is obviously closely related to information and identity management, but has a strong legal/regulatory aspect. Especially the lack of any harmonization of global privacy frameworks is a constant threat to globally operating companies. Some of these aspects will be discussed at the next Liberty Plenary meeting. 

tags: privacy google privacy management liberty alliance