As anyone in the identity industry knows, more lies between America and Europe that just an ocean. In fact, when it comes to privacy and data protection, a wide gulf separates the old and new worlds.

Germany in particular is often perceived as hidebound, not to say paranoid, when it comes to companies collecting personal data about their customers. People are signing up by the thousands to have their houses deleted from Google StreetView, with the mass-circulation “Bild Zeitung” running panic-inducing headlines like “StreetView snoops private data” and warning their readers about“Google’s next attack: Now they’re using bikes to film us!” The German minister of consumer affairs, Ilse Aigner, has publicly urged her fellow citizens to follow her example and cancel their Facebook accounts.

Most Americans I know simply shake their heads and grumble about “unhinged eurocrats run amok”. But unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. For better or worse, American companies need to realize that these are genuine concerns by genuine people. And no matter how lackadaisical US consumers may be when it comes to handing out personal information, the reality is that Europeans are not.

“But isn’t that what Safe Harbor is all about?”, one American identity expert (who shall remain nameless) exclaimed recently when I asked him how he thinks the problem should be addressed. True – but apparently, safe harbors in the US are anything but. That at least is what the so-called “Duesseldorf Circle”, a group of data privacy officials from all German states, stated in a report released last April. They accuse US companies of cheating on the agreement which was reached way back in 2000 between the United States and the EU. Read the rest of this entry »

The Internet, like an elephant, never forgets.

Unfortunately, it also never forgives, as witnessed by the case of Stacy Snyder, a 25 year-old former student at Millersville University School of Education in Pennsylvania, who wanted to become a teacher. Until the day she went to a party and had her picture taken drinking from a plastic beaker and wearing a pirate hat.

The picture found its way onto MySpace, where it was seen by a professor who thought it decidedly unfunny. In fact, he was so incensed that he informed the school authorities who refused to grant the young woman the diploma she had earned, stating that her conduct was “unprofessional” and that she had, albeit indirectly, encouraged young people to drink. Stacy went to court, arguing that the school had infringed on her right of free speech under the First Amendment, but a federal judge threw her case out.

All this happened back in 2007, but it is quoted at length in Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s book „Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age“, and it provides an extreme example of how rash behavior can come back to haunt you in the Digital Age. The author pontificates at length about the need for parents to teach their kids to behave responsibly when online (as if the cyber kids are going to listen to old fuddy-duddies like us).

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