National Cyber Security Alliance to Coordinate Data Privacy Day (click here to read more)

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The digital economy challenges us to recognize personal information as a key business asset requiring standard of care to optimize the value of the information while also protecting the source – our customers, clients, citizens, friends and neighbors.

Our goals for The Privacy Projects are to enhance the practice of privacy by developing and promoting privacy standards, improve trusted management of personal information in the networked environment through research and education, and increase the quality of privacy policies, practices and technologies through collaboration and outreach.

We recognize that many other nonprofit organizations are engaged in good and productive work in these areas and we are delighted to work with other in constructive collaboration toward achieving mutual goals.

We believe that information privacy is essential to free societies and to free economies.  As information about people, things and services increasingly become the resource upon which our economic engines run, securing personal information to protect personal and commercial interests and managing that information in ways that respect the dignity of the individual are no longer optional – they are required to advance.

Academic Research

The Privacy Projects has begun undertaking academic research to identify and explore the most challenging issues in managing personal information.  We recognize that technological developments have, in many cases, outstripped the current regime of privacy principals, laws and regulations.  We are focusing on the most relevant issues to advancing privacy policies and practices, including examining the processes of leading corporations and organizations to find which work best in the real world to both protect and respect personal information.

Collaboration and Outreach

We are striving to create as much dialogue and information sharing as possible in order to promote advances in thinking about data privacy.  To that end, we are promoting Data Privacy Day on 28 January 2010, the third time this day is celebrated in the United States.  Data Privacy Day is set aside specifically to create a ‘deep dive’ into the challenges, opinions, and solutions to individual privacy issues.  We are taking this opportunity to promote the best ways for businesses to manage customer and client data, for individuals to protect their own personal information, and for students to interact with their peers online in ways that don’t threaten their own data privacy.

Part of the Solution

We firmly believe that better solutions are needed and we will achieve them through a combination of public sector law and regulation, commercial adoption of recognized best practices, and diligent oversight by engaged third parties.  Please join in our search!