The future of privacy and the cloud occupied a sidestage at CES 2013 this morning, with one panelist comparing privacy lost to something else that can't be replaced.
"Getting your privacy back is like getting your virginity back," said Jim Reavis, Executive Director of the non-profit Cloud Security Alliance, from a room on the second floor of Las Vegas Convention Center North building. The on-stage conversation between Reavis and other privacy experts focused mainly on desired changes to how to make the nebulous concept of online privacy more user-friendly.
Sid Stamm, lead privacy engineer for Mozilla, suggested that just because more and more data is being hosted remotely, "in the cloud," that doesn't mean that it's automatically less safe. "If we introduce transparency, we can make people feel safer about where their data is being stored," he said.
He also said that he thought that developers have to start matching data and privacy management to user expectation. "We should be engineering products which only do what [end-users] expect them to do. It may be harder, but it's in our best interests," he said.