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Asia-Pacific Dashboard Digest | Notes from the iappANZ President, November 14, 2014 Related reading: Singapore's PDPC announces latest enforcement actions

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Welcome to the 46th and possibly final Digest from me. When I began, I talked about the weather as you do when you are getting to know people. Now, of course, that we are better acquainted, we discuss all manner of topics, be it Lauren Bacall, One Direction, U2, the latest in sport and the arts—and of course the entire range of news that affects our privacy in this region. Late-night Thursday writing for my iappANZ friends has become quite a routine. Happily I will be passing the baton to the new president, who I suspect will grow to love writing to you all just as much as I have. Come to our Summit and see who this is—as well as meet all of the other international stellar privacy speakers.

But now on to another bumper week of privacy news. There is much on “the boy in the bubble,” our privacy commissioner, webcam woes, privacy class-action speculation, social media advances and concerns, Internet of Things tensions, hackings and how the New Zealand Office of the Privacy Commissioner continues to grow and innovate.

The article of the week is about Alex. And big data, metadata, trust, spies and the business case for data. This week, a teenage girl in the U.S. tweeted that she thought Alex at the Target checkout was “hot.” In no time at all he had 600,000 followers and so on. The article is terrific—covering Britain’s top spy chief Richard Hannigan, who says his office is “happy to be part of a mature debate on privacy in the digital age. But privacy has never been an absolute right”—and bringing to the fore the value of big data and the fact that if you want to tap into that value, you need trust. For more on how to build a framework to make this happen, come and hear Vodafone Global CPO Stephen Deadman on Monday.

Trust is without doubt the topic that has come to the fore every week over the last 46 weeks: trustworthiness of the consumer and for the consumer. Reputation is the currency of the future, and in “the 21st century, new trust networks and the reputation capital they generate will reinvent the way we think about wealth, markets, power and personal identity in ways we can’t yet imagine.” The business model for personal information management systems is just the beginning. The Internet of Things is of course an essential part of this, and the question has been posed: Can privacy and the Internet of Things coexist or even thrive together? Come to the Summit and hear Peter Leonard draw out the answer from the world’s finest minds.

Webcam breaches hit the media this week with breaches at Harvard and Canberra. Luckily one of my favourite technology writers, Peter Moon, is saying DIY network security isn’t beyond most of us. Makes the breaches seem all the more unnecessary. In a week of hacking reports, it would be fascinating to hear a G20 discussion over the weekend between Prime Minister Tony Abbott and President Vladimir Putin as one of the leading cybersecurity firms claims the Russian government condones hacks on Western retail and banking business.

I wonder if they get scared when they read, “Law enforcement authorities in more than a dozen countries shut hundreds of illegal websites and arrested some operators, employing new techniques to unmask those hiding behind anonymity software, European officials said.”

U on Sunday asks if there is such a thing as privacy and do we want it—clearly a Brisbane Sunday paper. Twitter thinks it’s important, as privacy flags are amongst its reported upgrades this week.

Australia’s privacy commissioner has been flat out, with several decisions on the office’s website. The most interesting and widely reported is, of course, the own motion investigation into whether the Department of Immigration and Border Protection had reasonable security in place to protect the information of asylum-seekers. Seems it was aware of the risk but didn’t act appropriately to avoid it. Almost 10,000 detainees had personal information made public online, interesting in the light of what Barrister Michael Rivette claimed last week would come to pass—class-actions for privacy breaches—a theme picked up in this week’s media. This was no doubt of interest to many who practice in this area.

The New Zealand Office of the Privacy Commissioner continues to grow, so if you are keen on working there,  four available positions are listed here, and if you just want to tell the world about your privacy services, list on their Directory of Privacy Professionals.

Thank you for having me and for many of your kind emails, and with a bit of luck, I hope to drop in occasionally in the future.

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