Privacy issues are difficult. On one hand many initiatives have the best intention, but happen to invade people's right to privacy by accident. An example of this would be a website by some students where they gave public grades to their teachers, based on how professional, fair and nice they thought the teacher to be. Some of the teachers thought this was a great move and endorsed the idea, others thought it was not something that should be done in public, as "the students' report cards are not published either". The site host pulled down the evaluation pages after some students posted gradings on other people besides teachers. The Finnish data protection ombudsman is investigating the case, but says that it is possible that the pages are re-opened. The criteria is weather this service is regarded as a person register (should not be public), or just information channeling (can be public).

Then, there are other initiatives which can only be understood as companies' attempt to get tough on industrial espionage at the expense of their employees's right to privacy. A prime example from Finland is the new data protection law, sadly nicknamed "Lex Nokia". This new law gives companies the right to track their employees' email data details, i.e. where emails are sent to, do they contain attachements, if yes which file formats and how large. It is said that the origin of this law comes from Nokia who was concerned that their employees are sending confidential information to its rivals (some real cases have been discovered, unfortunately). Many argue that the law is useless in tracking or reducing industrial espionage, because only a real idiot would be sending confidential information to a competitor by email from his/her work email account. Well, those idiots do exist but I agree that passing a law that invades everyone's privacy just to catch a few sad individuals is like shooting flies with a cannon. Especially since the company needs to inform beforehand every individual who is going to be monitored.

But this is not the whole story. Now that this new law has been passed, the Confederation of Finnish Industries EK demands that the data protection ombudsman should have no right to supervise how companies are implementing it. In other words, there would be a law but no one to monitor it. EK's reasoning is that the role of data protection ombudsman is not written in the data protection law, but in the law about people's right to personal data. If you think about it, the whole premise behind this scenario is that companies would always be doing the right thing (no supervision needed), but the employees would be doing the wrong thing (strict personal data supervision needed). This sounds quite scary.

It's been a common practice for years to run a security check by the Finnish Secret Police on new candidates before hiring them.  Today about 60 companies are using this service, and last year the security police produced 10,000 security reports on people applying for a job that fits the definition. They say this service has increased every year, and that 2008 was a record year. The secret police has now defined protecting the Finnish innovation system as one of their core tasks. The industries most targetted by espionage are biosciences, medical and pharmaseutical industry, novel materials, nanotechnology, telecommunications and location technologies. Secret police plans to do consulting in both big companies who are important to national economy, but increasingly also in small, innovative start-ups.

The police is also getting tougher on white-collar crime, especially in the stock market. The downshift is inviting more and more misuse of inside knowledge, as well as breaking the rules of communication. When it becomes obvious that the company is going to produce poor economic results, it is increasingly attractive for managers to sell their own shares, or just not give out accurate information to other shareholders.

At times like these it feels quite fresh to be working on promoting open source and open collaboration.

Sources: Kauppalehti May 18, Kauppalehti May 19, Helsingin Sanomat May 16