I know it’s funny, but in fact it’s me, by far the oldest guy at KCP, who is actually the greatest fan of Twitter. Perhaps if you don’t have as much time left to waste as some of my younger colleagues you learn to appreciate abbreviation.

Anyway, the European Identity Conference which ended yesterday here in Munich produced a bumper crop of Tweets which I have been browsing through this morning at my leisure (first time in a week I’v had any), and I thought I would share a few with those of you who do not yet fully appreciate just how powerful this new medium actually is.

Summing up of a large multinational conference like EIC running over many days and featuring some of the finest speakers in the industry, and doing this in a format that restricts the writer to 140 characters max, is a challenge, of course, but many of those present not only rose to it, but proved themselves past masters of terse, to-the-point, no nosense (well actually, sometimes a bit of nonsense) communication.

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Recently, at a press briefing by German IBM boss Stefan Jetter who waxed enthusiastic about Cloud Computing, an elderly journalist rose and asked him a show-stopper: “Where are my data when they’re out there in the Cloud?” Jetter did a double take, but my colleague pressed on: “I mean, physically, where are they?”

Of course, the answer is: On some nameless server somewhere, anywhere in a grid farm in Ohio or Dublin or… In fact, the usual answer is : Who cares?

Well, for one the German privacy protection agencies. Passing data across national boundaries can be a federal offense not only here. The EU Data Protection Directive (officially Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data) mandates that personal data may only be transferred to third countries if that country provides an adequate level of protection – something the U.S., just to name one, does not, at least not according to European standards, especially since foreigners do not benefit from the US Privacy Act of 1974.

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