CAN there be privacy in global networks? Dr Alexander Dix, chairman of the International Working Group on Data Protection, said the growing amount of day-to-day activity taking place online meant data protection was increasingly under threat.

In 1996, the group concluded there was no doubt the legal and technical protection of internet users’ privacy was insufficient.

With biannual meetings and significant campaigning since, it has been striving to rectify this.

The most recent meeting was held at Castle Cornet last week and attended by 50 delegates. The day before it, nine of them spoke at Guernsey’s first international data protection conference.

‘More and more activities and expressions of life are taking place online, such as communicating, canvassing, expressing political opinions, voting, buying, banking and playing,’ he said.

‘But the internet is an inherently insecure environment and people tend to forget that.’

Dr Dix said in real life – the offline world – there were reasonable expectations of privacy. But in the online one there were technical options for ubiquitous and unprecedented surveillance.

Law enforcement agencies and private controllers wanted to use these options and criminal and terrorism agencies to abuse them.

‘Obviously there are just as legitimate expectations of privacy and anonymity online as offline,’ said Dr Dix.

‘Global networks will not become successful infrastructures without inbuilt privacy protection. Trust will not be generated but destroyed by excessive surveillance.’

He said how, in order to fight crime and terrorism or to control political opposition, states increasingly converted global networks into platforms of surveillance by data retention, forced identification and renationalisation.

Private industry also wanted to use the surveillance capacity of networks.

But global ones already depended on a minimum level of reliability, security, trust and privacy.

This was obvious with activities such as online banking, e-health projects and web-based counselling but also applied to regular email communication which – despite spam – tended to complement or replace offline forms of communication.

Dr Dix referred to comments made by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates last month when he spoke of the need for this to go much further.

Speaking at the corporation’s annual dinner, he recognised that in the foreseeable future all of people’s information would be on the internet.

‘Historically, we’ve essentially relied on incompetence to protect our privacy.’

But this would no longer suffice, he said.

‘It would be a strong milestone to have an all-inclusive uniform privacy law that would give consumers control over their personal information. This would increase their confidence in providing information to legitimate businesses and other organisations.’