What's the conference about?
New technical and legal developments pose greater and greater privacy dilemmas. Governments have in the recent years increasingly established and legalised surveillance schemes in form of data retention, communication interception or CCTVs for the reason of fighting terrorism or serious crimes. Surveillance Monitoring of individuals is also a threat in the private sector: Private organisations are for instance increasingly using profiling and data mining techniques for targeted marketing, analysing customer buying predictions or social sorting. Work place monitoring practices allow surveillance of employees. Emerging pervasive computing technologies, where individuals are usually unaware of a constant data collection and processing in their surroundings, will even heighten the problem that individuals are effectively losing control over their personal spheres. At a global scale, Google Earth and other corporate virtual globes may have dramatic consequences for the tracking and sorting of individuals. With CCTV, the controlling power of surveillance is in few hands. With live, high resolution imagery feeds from space in the near future, massive surveillance may soon be available to everybody, a development whose consequences we do not yet grasp. New means of surveillance are also enabled by social networks, in which individuals are publishing many intimate personal details about themselves and others. Such social networks are today already frequently analysed by employers, marketing industry, law enforcement or social engineering.
The aim of this conference Track is to discuss and analyse such privacy risks of surveillance for humans and society as well as countermeasures for protecting the individuals’ rights to informational self-determination from multi-disciplinary perspectives.
