Privacy not a guarantee

By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist

Johannesburg, 23 Mar 2009

True online privacy no longer exists. This is according to Dominic White, manager of the Deloitte Security and Privacy Group, who will be speaking on the battleground of online privacy at the ITWeb Security Summit 2009 being held from 26 to 28 May.

“We are seeing trends where more people are becoming aware of the importance of their online privacy,” says White, “This is also being supported by the emergence of more international legislation around security and online privacy. In SA, the proposed Protection of Personal Information bill is expected to be affected by 2010 and 2011.”

Securing privacy

According to White, some of the key issues being examined at the seminar will involve the implications for online privacy and putting it into the context of the current economic climate and emerging security trends.

White says: “There's a big focus on online service; in the old days you would get worried about companies storing that information. But now, because of social networking, there's a significant portion of interaction with friends and businesses communicating online on platforms such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. It's become much more difficult for users to protect their privacy online, because of so much information that's freely available.”

White points out that Google's applications platform is enriched with so many applications and horizontal services, that it makes securing an individual's privacy much more difficult. He says users can plan their routes to work using Google Maps, chat to friends on Google Talk, and add information to Google documents, which leads to issues of data protection.

White says this year's summit will see more international speakers and aims to give delegates relevant security information that they can take away with them.

“One of the differences in this year's summit is that it's trying to make the message consistent. People can walk away with consistent relevant understanding. The general trends that will come up in the conference will be around cyber threats, security risk to businesses, data protection and technologies coming from anti-virus vendors.”