Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

The winners put privacy considerations in the forefront of customer and employee strategy, and don't leave them to a legal department or IT group. Not surprisingly, organizations outside the U.S. continue to lead the way with privacy practices. But the big surprise is that a U.S. government agency, the Federal Trade Commission, took home a top prize as well.

The IAPP award recipients are the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the Victorian Department of Justice (Victoria, Australia), and the Privacy and Identity Management for Europe project (PRIME).

Small Organization Winner: The FTC
The winner in the Small Organization category (less than 5,000 employees), is the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s annual agency-wide privacy awareness program. Through its comprehensive “Privacy Week,” the FTC has successfully heightened agency awareness of the need to protect information assets against unauthorized use or disclosure.

Privacy Week kicked off with “File Clean-up Day,” where staff devoted an entire business day to taking stock of all electronic and paper files using a compliance check-list and certification process that ensured that information was properly handled and stored. Over 1,300 “File Clean-up Day” kits were distributed to employees who used the kits to comply with FTC records management policies. The day proved very productive and engaged many employees who created personalized data collection “burn bags” for the appropriate gathering of documents for destruction.

Large Organization Winner: Victorian Department of Justice
In the Large Organization category (more than 5,000 employees), the Victorian Department of Justice (Victoria, Australia) won for its national privacy education program designed to instill privacy impact assessment processes in project management, policy development and formal training efforts for all public sector employees across Victoria. In 2008, for the third year running, the Department worked with the Victorian Privacy Commissioner to create and deliver “Privacy Awareness Week,” an education program directed at the 63 statutory entities and 6,000 full-time metropolitan and regional staff across Victoria. The program was coordinated with other national bodies including the Privacy Commissioner of Hong Kong and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

HP-IAPP Privacy Innovation Technology Winner: PRIME
This year’s winner is PRIME: the Privacy and Identity Management for Europe project, an E.U. funded research initiative that focuses on privacy and identity management (IAM) schemes and their impacts on a variety of fields and industries including e-commerce, e-government, e-health, finance, travel and telecommunications. PRIME is the result of a coalition of 20 research institutions in the U.S. and Europe along with industry partners including IBM, HP, T-Mobile, Swisscom and Lufthansa.

The PRIME initiative produced a highly innovative technology program architecture that governs access control, data retention and policy elements. Two key highlights of the program are “Data Track” and “Idemix.” Data Track improves the transparency of data processing while Idemix, a private credential system, employs an encrypted, anonymous log-in to Web sites in order to ensure that Web user information remains confidential.

How does your company deal with privacy issues?