Asian Privacy Scholars Explore Social Networking Dangers

Abstract

This article is a report on the Asian Privacy Scholars Network (APSN) 2nd International Conference: Privacy in the Social Networked World, Meiji University, Tokyo on 19-20 November 2012. The Conference involved researchers from ten countries, and was hosted by the Centre for Business Information Ethics at Meiji University, Tokyo. APSN is an association of over 50 privacy researchers, primarily from Asia-Pacific countries.

Privacy issues in social networks (SNS) were a main focus of the conference, with papers on the impact of the proposed EU Regulation on SNS; on the perspective of ‘crowd-sourced surveillance’ as an emergent use of SNS to identify, shame and report to police; on regulatory strategies including competition law to protect privacy; and on the market opportunities offered by the desires of individuals for more privacy-friendly social media/SNS to emerge.

The conference sub-theme was privacy developments across Asia, and papers were presented concerning the state of privacy protection in Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and India.

The final Conference session debated and agreed upon a statement by all the speakers, urging governments and data protection agencies in Asian jurisdictions to study the following matters: • the need for comprehensive data privacy laws in countries that do not already have them; • the national advantages of accession of Asian countries to multinational privacy treaties such as Council of Europe data protection Convention 108; • whether existing data privacy laws can adequately regulate Social Networking Services (SNS) and other social media; • the need for comprehensive privacy protections in relation to any development of national identification (ID) systems.’

Keywords: data protection, privacy, social networks, SNS, social media, Asia, Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, India