OASIS Privacy Management Reference Model (PMRM)

["Carl Reed" <creed@opengeospatial.org>]

Dear PMRM Proposers and Staff

 

Privacy in the digital age is an extremely important legal and social issue. Having a for a standards based privacy management reference model will be of great service to the ICT community. However, I do have a few observations.

 

Given I work for the Open Geospatial Consortium, my comments come from the geospatial (location) perspective. One of the hottest global privacy issues has to do with the implications of being able to track mobile assets in near real time and to archive such information. This location tracking issue is exacerbated by oblique mapping applications, such as Google Street view, that many in Europe consider to be an invasion of their privacy. There is a very recent editorial on the location tracking topic:

 

Location-Tracking Services: Why You Should Think Twice

http://www.pcworld.com/article/199929/locationtracking_services_why_you_should_think_twice.html?tk=hp_new

 

As such, a number of standards organizations have been addressing standards and standards frameworks related to how users deal with location applications and privacy. None of these standards activities are mentioned in the charter. I would encourage the group to consider the work of the IETF GeoPRIV Working Group (http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/geopriv/charter/) and the Open Mobile Alliance, specifically the Location Interoperability Privacy Guidelines (http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/affiliates/LicenseAgreement.asp?DocName=/lif/lif-tr-101-v2.0.0.zip).

 

Finally, the OGC has a new Spatial Legal Policy subcommittee. This SC was formed at the request of the OGC Board of Directors to consider issues related privacy, data quality, and other aspects of geospatial content and service delivery that have significant legal implications.

 

Therefore, I would encourage the proposed TC consider geospatial use cases as part of the Reference Model development process. 

 

Carl Reed, PhD
CTO and Executive Director Specification Program
OGC

 

The OGC: Helping the World to Communicate Geographically

 

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