Who's Watching Me?

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Who's Watching Me?

9/26/2006

Bob Blakley’s reflections from the Digital ID World conference

A principal analyst for identity and privacy strategies at the Burton Group, Bob Blakley gave a talk this month at Digital ID World in Santa Clara, CA, titled, “What is Privacy, Really?” In a separate interview, Campus Technology logged Blakley’s comments relative to privacy and technology in higher education:

Bob Blakley ponders privacy and identity

Conventionally, people think of privacy in terms of secrecy. They think that privacy means the obligation to protect information that we have observed, maybe in the course of our job, about other people. The point that I made [in my talk] today was that there’s another part of privacy that we don’t speak of so often, which is equally important, or perhaps more important – and that is our obligation not to pry into other peoples’ affairs; to avert our eyes or close our ears if we come across something that is obviously private. And [I spoke about] our obligation as a society to censure people who don’t fulfill that obligation, because that kind of behavior – voyeurism and gossip – is destructive to civil society. I made an argument that there may be a way to construct a right to privacy that d'esn’t currently exist in our constitution on these grounds, if it continues to be the case that lots of private information is exposed.

The academic community has, in a certain sense, been a leader in the development of technology [related to this]. When I was the first editor of the OASIS SAML specification, we had a lot of discussions about the relationship between privacy and anonymity and the ability to identify attributes of people without identifying the people themselves. The higher education community needed to be able to comply with the FERPA regulation, and needed to be able to, for example, enroll a student from one campus at another campus without revealing that student’s identity to the second campus. And what was developed on top of SAML was the protocol called Shibboleth – that was one of the initiatives that formed some of my thinking on this topic.

Higher ed is a microcosm of [privacy] regulations. The HIPPA regulation applies to the campus medical clinics, and financial privacy regulations apply to universities because they often, for example, issue ID cards to students that allow them to purchase meals at a commissary or to purchase textbooks. So, higher education encounters privacy regulations in many of its operations: health center operations, financial operations, and such, in the administration of both disciplinary records and academic records.