35% of all Germans would be willing to pay for a guarantee that their data is being used according to their wishes and not for profit without consent according to a study of the German Institute for Trust and Security on the Internet (DIVSI). And there would be even more, but many think even though they would pay it cannot be guaranteed that their data is not misused. The average payment would be 41 Euro which results in the sum of 900 million.

Source: DIVSI

The chart shows that 85% think that the misuse of personal data should be followed and prosecuted harder and 84% want that foreign Internet companies have to comply to German laws. Thus, the European Data Protection reform is definitely overdue.

On Friday the first workshop of the Internet Privacy Engineering Network (IPEN) took place in Berlin State Parliament with leading data protection experts like Peter Hustinx (European Data Protection Supvervisor, EDPS), Peter Schaar (EAID), and several Data Protection Authority (DPA) representatives from all over Europe. IPEN was founded by Achim Klabunde (Head of IT Policy of the EDPS) and aims to build privacy into everyday tools and bring legal people and engineers closer together. George Danezis from the University College London said he never saw so many legal experts and engineers at one table and that this is promising to push privacy in software engineering. Carlo from Lynx stated that the internet is broken and surveillance cannot be prevented as long as we have insecure protocols.

Anyway there are much more things to improve besides protocols and quick wins possible to reduce the misuse of personal data as performed by many companies nowadays. We from OWASP presented our initial version of the Top 10 Privacy Risks that provides engineers and business architects guidance and raises awareness for common privacy risks in web applications.

IPEN decided beside others to develop a privacy cookbook for engineers and one for business architects and to start a project to boost secure communication for several channels like email and sms. Further information about the event was published in a press release and on Twitter.

New America’s Open Technology Institute published a paper on NSA’s Impact on Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity. NSA surveillance not only causes economic loss to US companies like cloud computing vendors or the defence industry because foreign companies and governments lose trust. Also US foreign policy interests are undermined and additional costs to the Internet Freedom Agenda and US Credibility in
Internet Governance are caused.

Furthermore security standards in the internet are compromised and vulnerabilities are created. This might require costly initiatives to border the internet like the proposal of the Deutsche Telekom for a Schengen Routing or the European Cloud Partnership.

The alternative report on protection of fundamental rights published by the German committee on fundamental rights and democracy considers mass surveillance by NSA and other secret services as one of the two major threats besides the right-wing terror organization NSU (National Socialist Underground). The major threat to free democracies moves away from outside attackers to an aggressive overreaction of the internal system says one of the publishers Rolf Gössner in a German heise article. Furthermore he states that the German government and justice refuse legal or political consequences for protection so far.