If you missed Frank Work’s keynote presentation at the Symposium, scroll a bit further down because we captured it on video and you can watch it from the comfort of your desk (or lap or palm).

Related to Frank’s comments, I had the occasion this week to work and think about the Internet of Things (you gotta love the acronym IoT). One of the things our research kept telling us was how, in little to no time at all, IoT is going to exponentially increase the amount of data created, collected, stored and used. Compare this to the already vast amount of data we have created in the last couple of decades and compare that to the previous century.

The catchy point to all of this is to try to remember that one of the basic principles behind our privacy laws is the tenet of data minimization. We tell organizations and governments to only collect that small amount of information that is necessary for the identified purposes. Obviously, this tenet of privacy law is going to be drastically challenged in the coming years.

Frank alluded to this in his comments as he tried to deconstruct the notion of privacy that was developed oh so many years ago (you know, the one based on the OECD principles). I know that other principles are being challenged too—i.e., will accountability make the need for consent redundant?—but this week I wondered if perhaps IoT is killing the data minimization principle.

What do you think? Have technology and society changed so much over the past few years that we have to rethink our entire framework for privacy protection? If we don’t, will we not simply be holding on to an illusory principle with no practical relevance?