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Speaking before the audience at the recent IAPP Data Protection Congress in Brussels, keynoter Woody Hartzog made a challenging assertion: "Control is the wrong goal for privacy by design, perhaps the wrong goal for data protection in general." But isn't control a central tenet of good privacy? It sure is. But it shouldn't be, the author of "Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies" argued. While everyone emphasizes "control" of personal data as core to privacy, too much zeal for control dilutes efforts to design information tech correctly.

In 1968, Science published the now-famous paper “The Tragedy of the Commons” by ecologist Garrett Hardin. In it, Hardin questioned society’s ability to manage shared resources, concluding that individuals will act in their self-interest and ultimately spoil the resource.

We're yet to see the details of the deal between the Government and Labor which would allow the passage of laws to give police and investigators access to encrypted messages.

That leaves one more day in this sitting of Parliament to get the laws through, after the Government claimed there was an urgent need to do so before Christmas.

"Law professor Ryan Calo, co-director of the University of Washington's Tech Policy Lab, says AI-based monitoring of social media may follow a predictable pattern for how new technologies gradually work their way into law enforcement.

"The way it would happen would be we would take something that everybody agrees is terrible — something like suicide, which is epidemic, something like child pornography, something like terrorism — so these early things, and then if they show promise in these sectors, we broaden them to more and more things. And that's a concern.""