Almaden Institute

Privacy in the Information Age: A National Academies’ Study Abstract: On June 4, 2002, the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies convened a study entitled Privacy in the Information Age. Funded entirely by private foundations, the committee, made up of technologists, lawyers, social scientists, and business information specialists, was chartered to “undertake a comprehensive assessment that will evaluate causes for concern about privacy in the information age and tools and strategies for responding.” This talk will begin by discussing how the committee has proceeded in investigating this subject. While it is too early to discuss the findings of the committee, the speaker will identify a number of issues that he finds of particular interest. Among these are the difficulty of determining just what we mean by privacy, some of the conflicting values that color our intuitions about what should be private and what should be public, and the way in which technology has jarred our notions of the private and the public.   Jim Waldo - Bio  Jim Waldo  Distinguished Engineer  Sun Microsystems  jim.waldo@sun.com  Web Sites  http://www.cstb-privacy.org/ Biography Jim Waldo is a Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems, where he is the lead architect for Jini, a distributed programming system based on Java. Prior to Jini, Jim worked in JavaSoft and Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where he did research in the areas of object-oriented programming and systems, distributed computing, and user environments. Before joining Sun, Jim spent eight years at Apollo Computer and Hewlett Packard working in the areas of distributed object systems, user interfaces, class libraries, text and internationalization. While at HP, he led the design and development of the first Object Request Broker, and was instrumental in getting that technology incorporated into the first OMG CORBA specification. He edited the book, The Evolution of C++: Language Design in the Marketplace of Ideas (MIT Press), and was one of the authors of The Jini Specification (Addison Wesley). Jim is an adjunct faculty member of Harvard University, where he teaches distributed computing in the Department of Computer Science. Jim received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). He also holds M.A. degrees in both linguistics and philosophy from the University of Utah. He is a member of the IEEE and ACM.