Security and Privacy !

I attended a security and privacy conference on Feb 7th and 8th at the Victoria conference centre. It was sponsored by ReBoot here in Victoria.

I enjoyed hearing the information that the presenters put forth. The best speakers I thought was the Chief Privacy Officer from Sun microsystems, and there were also folks there from Cisco, Microsoft, Telus, etc...

I think the most interesting things I heard were that privacy is a "Zero Sum Game" that means that the more privacy we go for, the higher the sercurity has to be in our devices, such as PDA, CelPhone, Laptop, Desktop etc.  It is almost as if we can not get more privacy without more security.

Also, the social networking aspect, IE facebook and the like. The point was brought up that the more information that one has on social networking sites, the more likely people are to infer things such as your sexual orientation, your religious affiliations, purely based on assumptions from friends you have in your "circle" of friends.

We are living in an age where people are blogging about the minutia of their life, and that information is stored and backed up for the world to see years and years down the road.

The point was made that the children of today are writing down their every thought, and possibly in 10 years when they go to get that high paying job, the employer will "google" them and find out all their dirty little secrets. Be able to talk to their friends about what kind of person they are, and their secrets will not be so invisible as those of our parents.

Exciting things I noticed, is the trend more and more for mobile phones to replace even laptops with the "T1 link on your hip" you can do video conferencing on your phone and much more.

These types of advances will put information at our fingertips more and more in the days to come. Exciting times!