Mr. Angus, I love that you refer to “unintended consequences”. I didn't use the slide here, but I have a big slide when I talk to, especially, tech companies. My slide just reads: beware of unintended consequences. That is always the fear.
I called last year the year of the engineer, because I talked to engineers at all of the leading companies around the world. I talked to Adobe. I talked to Intel, and HP, to Google. I've talked to Facebook and others, but I specifically wanted to talk to their engineering, computer science technical teams to translate, if you will, or operationalize the principles of privacy by design into code.
Of course, we've been talking to lawyers for years, so I'm not worried about lawyers and policy writers understanding how to translate the policy requirements into policy codes, etc., but the engineers were being left out and the computer scientists. When I talked to them, I said, this is very simple. I can't write the code for you, but I can translate this into what does “primary purpose” mean, and how do you ensure that data minimization principles are being reflected in your operational procedures.
Privacy as the default is such a critical feature. We try to explain this not only to engineers—and they get it, of course—but to laypeople. I always have what I call my neighbours' test. I have very clever, smart neighbours, but they're not in the privacy field. So I try to explain it to my neighbours, and if they grasp the concept, which they will, then we're off and running. It has to be accessible to the public and to engineers alike, and the notion of privacy as the default resonates. As one of my neighbours said, does this mean I get it for free? I don't have to ask for it? I don't have to scour the privacy policy to find it? I just get privacy for free? I said, yes, it would be embedded in the system by default as an automatic feature. She said, “Sign me up. That's what I want.”
That's the kind of discussion we have. As I said, we talked to all of the major companies. For Google+, when they were doing their beta test for Google+, their new online social media, we participated in the beta. They're very interested in the privacy issues. They've come up with this concept of circles and restricting privacy and sharing within a given circle. So you could have one for your workplace colleagues, one for your neighbours, one for your family, etc.
We've talked to all of the major companies about privacy by design, and I would hazard a guess that if you went to any of them they would know about it.