It's Data Privacy Day and Facebook's the Only Company Doing Something?

Yesterday was International Data Privacy Day and it's in its fourth year of observance. The major players that have made any sort of mention of Data Privacy Day are Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Opera and IBM.

It's your data, keep it private

Microsoft has basically said they're adding a few new security features into Hotmail and Windows Live. The major feature includes adding a shield next to emails from trusted senders and not next to ones that they perceive as threats. So if you're still using Hotmail (note the sarcasm), you're basically being spoonfed which emails not to click in your inbox (which most other email services now send straight to spam). It's some action but can it be called significant? 

Opera released a bunch of statistics showing global behaviour regarding data privacy, more specifically what percentages of people from each country worry about their online privacy, how many people worry about the government invading their online privacy and what measures people took to safeguard their privacy. While statistics do help in decision making, this is just a discussion. No action taken.

Google's Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering, Alma Whitten, is holding a public hearing in Washington DC, explaining how Google is committed to keeping its users' data private. A video of this hearing will be available shortly on Google Privacy channel on YouTube. 

IBM's running a column on the topic on its Smarter Planet blog. Harriet Pearson, VP Security Counsel & Chief Privacy Officer at IBM, maintains that their customers' privacy is important and stresses on the Internet of Things and using privacy to secure trust in order to make products that revolutionize the world. Nice. But no major move. It is the DAY of Data Privacy.

Facebook's, of course, being the oil for the privacy fire, has made some significant changes, sans the lectures this Data Privacy Day. They've started using https for secure connection as well as social captcha to prevent unauthorized logging in. Here's one company, that, agreed, on the one hand needs most of all to demonstrate its concerns over privacy but has actually used this day to make its demonstration. Seems a little strangely wonderful doesn't it?