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Privacy pivotal to information age

Paul Vecchiatto
By Paul Vecchiatto, ITWeb Cape Town correspondent
Cape Town, 07 Dec 2004

"Privacy will become to the information age what environmental issues have been to the industrial age," says Marc Rotenberg, president and executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre (Epic).

Rotenberg made this comment to ITWeb at a break during the one-day African Electronic Privacy and Public Voice Symposium held in Cape Town yesterday.

Epic is a public research interest centre in the US capital of Washington. It was established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy and US constitutional values.

Rotenberg says he has been heartened to see how important privacy issues are to some of the African delegates at the conference.

"Initially they were a bit sceptical, citing that privacy was low down on their list of priorities, with attention needed on other things such as infrastructure, education and bridging the digital divide. But, now they realise that it is important."

This is the first symposium of its type organised by Epic in Africa. One of its key aims is to educate African Internet users on the importance of privacy. This includes the collection of information about people by governments, companies and other organisations, without their consent.

"Just because we have laws against terrorism and child pornography, it does not mean that everyone using the Internet is either a terrorist or a child pornographer. Neither does this lessen the importance of law enforcement over the Internet. Rather, law enforcement must be done within the boundaries of good law."

Rotenberg advocates that good privacy law would be technology-neutral and have simple rules to make it easier for companies to follow and implement.

"What we have now is the real convergence of societies. While the economies of various countries may be different, the technologies used are the same. So issues such as spam marketing and electronic privacy are key to all countries."

He says that while there are technologies that encourage openness and the collection of data, there are also technologies that can be used to enhance a person`s privacy.

Epic was instrumental in the fight against the US Clipper encryption plan, which would have allowed the American government a "backdoor" into codes used to keep individual communications private.

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