Technology, the great privacy protector

Technology has eroded our privacy - and that's a fact. It's beyond dispute that more organisations, from banks and supermarkets to government agencies, know more about us than ever before.

Does that matter? Many people believe it does. And, believe it or not, some people working in the mainstream technology industry are worried about it too. But they think IT could be the answer to - as well as the cause of - the problem.

One hundred and fifty academics and researchers got together this week at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, to explore ways of protecting privacy amid an explosion in the amount of personal information that is being tracked electronically.

Rather than saying 'technology is bad' (as some people do in this debate), they were more interested in how it can be used to turn back the tide. For example, they said, video surveillance could be made more palatable if it worked in such a way that people's faces were blurred out. Only if a crime occurred would the more detailed images be made available. That sounds fair enough.

But the problem with such ideas (and there were more of them) is this: human beings. Who makes that decision? On whose instructions? With what legal right?

Technology per se is never enough, as the conference attendees admitted. You need the right legal framework - but that tends to lag behind the development of the 'Big Brother' type technologies. For example, in the US medical and insurance companies are bracing themselves for a key deadline involving the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which aims to protect the privacy of health records, among other things. That legislation was approved in 1996 but the privacy provisions are only now beginning to take effect. This isn’t really a case of better late than never. You can't put the genie back in the lamp.

Even technology's biggest proponents agree that it - and even the law - can only form part of the solution. Marketing, financial incentive and culture change are all part of preserving some measure of privacy, the people at the conference said. But the problem is that in too many cases there's simply no incentive for organisations to take privacy into account.

Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy famously told consumers some years ago that they have no privacy and to "just get over it".

Unless there's a dramatic change in the application of technology, and the law, and, indeed, the way companies do business and governments govern us, he may be proven right. And heaven forbid that should come to pass...