Last week, the IAPP held the largest gathering of Privacy Professionals ever. Although there were lots of topics covering a wide array of topics, there were several that were of particular interest. While I could say that the session titled Will Identity Theft be the Death of Data Mining was the star I wouldn’t be so bold (since I was on stage with John Gardner & Jennifer Barrett of Acxiom). The sessions on the Red Flags Rule (looking at the FDIC version) and Medical Identity Theft and Healthcare IT (HHS talking about their work to date) were particularly good.
For me, the best session was the networking session for the government. The topic was Blogs, Wikis, and Uncle Sam. Since I was just named the head of a new Focus Group responsible for coming up with recommendations for authentication for Government to Citizen interactions, this session was very important for me. The session raised a lot of issues that will be front and center in how the government communicates with Americans in the future. President Obama has put a great emphasis on getting in touch with the average person and there is great emphasis on using Social Media to do so. One of our tasks is to put together a recommendation that will help make sure that the people who believe they are speaking with members of the government in those venues are actually reaching who they think. Although access to things like medical and tax records require higher levels of authentication, for more communications will be done at the Social Media level.
I will be talking about the progress we make in the Focus Group going forward, but for the moment, it is important to understand that the Federal government is working to make sure that you are able to communicate with them being sure that only you are able to get to see your records and that whoever you are attempting to communicate with is who they say they are.
