Research needed
The State of the Net conference seemed to be a big success - lots of people, lots of great panels.
Two research questions for the future:
Can we learn what requests for data are made of companies by European governments? There may be a tension between the public position (”we are enormously solicitous of privacy”) and the non-public position (”tell us what you know, and don’t tell anyone you’re telling us — and keep all your data for three years.”) It would be very interesting to study this.
The Clean Feed reach is broader than I thought - it’s not considered “politically expedient” to oppose it in Australia at this point, and it’s used in several Northern European countries as well as the UK. No one knows exactly what is being filtered out, and ISPs can’t say what they’re doing. The systems all have different standards. And something like this will reach our shores soon. Another good subject for inquiry.