January 28 is Data Privacy Day, an international acknowledgment of the importance of privacy in an increasingly data-driven world. The main website for this event in America is here at StaySafeOnline.org. You may notice that ESET is a sponsor, and I think we can all get behind the key themes of Data Privacy Day this year: Respecting privacy, Safeguarding data, Enabling trust.
Personally speaking, I'm excited to be participating in a 2015 Data Privacy Day event in Atlanta that is focused on health data privacy, under the title: Health Privacy in a Fully Connected World. There will be a series of panel discussions between 1pm and 5pm Eastern, and the event will be live-streamed here.
The live streaming worked very well last year when I participated in a panel on privacy and big data. The videos are archived, so you can actually watch that entire 2014 event here or in the player further down this page (hint: the big data panel starts at about the 1 hour 51 minute minute).
For Data Privacy Day events in your area, check this page. Some of the events listed there are virtual and thus accessible to other countries. As if to underline the importance of data privacy, America has also declared this entire week of January 26-30, 2015, to be Tax Identity Theft Awareness Week. While this particular form of personal data abuse arises from loopholes in the U.S. income tax processing systems, identity theft and abuse of personally identifiable data is a worldwide problem. In fact, the idea of a data privacy day was initiated by the Council of Europe in 2007 as the European Data Protection Day. You can find information on DPD events in more than 30 European countries in this PDF report from the Council of Europe.
We will post updates from Data Privacy Data 2015 after the event, but in the meantime you can follow the action on social media using the Twitter hashtag #DPD15. And of course, there are plety of helpful articles about privacy here on We Live Security.
Here is the video recording of the 2014 Data Privacy Day kick-off event:
