The IP & Privacy Link - @Harkaway at #GartnerIAM

Originally posted on identitysander on WordPress: The IP & Privacy Link - @Harkaway at #GartnerIAM. This Ghost site is now the canonical home for this material. But you should only go to see it there if you want a laugh about how silly websites looked then. It's a time capsule now.

As the new season of conferences kicks into gear, I start to have thoughts too big to fit into tweets again. I once again had the pleasure of making it to London for the EMEA Gartner IAM Summit. There was a big crowd this year, and the best part, as it always is, was the conversations in hallways and at bars surrounding the official agenda. It's always good to get together with lots of like minded folks and talk shop.

On stage, the conversations were intense as always. @IdentityWoman took the stage and educated a very curious audience about what identity can mean in this brave new mobile world. And there was an interesting case made that "people will figure out that authentication is a vestigial organ" by @bobblakley. But the comment that caught my imagination most of all was by author and raconteur Nick Harkaway, aka @Harkaway.

He links IP (Intellectual Property for clarity since there are a few "IP" thingys floating around now) and privacy in a way that never occurred to me before. @Harkaway says "both [are] a sense of ownership about data you create even after you've put it out into the world." @IdentityWoman spoke at length about how our phones leave trails of data we want to control for privacy and perhaps profit reasons, and @bobblakley even proposed how to use that sort of data for authentication. At the core of both of those ideas is a sense of ownership. If it's "the data is mine and I want to keep it private" or "the data is mine and I want the right to sell it", it's all about starting from the data being something that belongs to you.

I typically react with skepticism to IP but with very open arms to privacy. So to suddenly have them linked in this way was quite a dissonance. But what difference is it to say that I write this work of fiction and expect it to be mine even after it's complete or I create this mass of geo-data by moving around with my phone and expect it to be mine even after I'm in bed at night? "But it's the carriers responsibility to actually generate and maintain that data!" OK. But if I write my work using Google Docs does that alter my IP rights? Does it matter perhaps that the novel is about something other than me? Does it matter that geo-data is not creative? (Of course, some geo-data is creative)

I don't have all, or perhaps any, answers here. But I thought this notion was worthy of fleshing out and further sharing. What do you think? Are IP and privacy in some way intimately linked?