Lora Bentley spoke with Christopher Wolf, co-chair of the Future of Privacy Forum, which recently partnered with researchers at George Washington University Law School to delve deeper into how emerging technology should affect the development of privacy law and policy.

Bentley: How did this partnership come to be?
Wolf: In the last year, the Future of Privacy Forum has come to be known as an organization that is thinking about interesting and emerging privacy issues that affect the protection of people’s data. That is also an area of scholarship that exists in various places, but probably nowhere stronger than at the George Washington University Law School. It’s really known for its faculty in the privacy area. They’ve written a lot about these issues and have taken the lead in getting people thinking about them. GW and Berkeley, for example, every year sponsor a privacy scholars conference.

So GW is known as a center for thinking about emerging privacy issues, as are we as a think tank, and we thought it was a natural for us to have a more formal relationship.

Bentley: Have you worked together before, then?
Wolf: We’ve already done a program, early in the forum’s existence in February of this year, at GW ... that had just amazing attendance from FTC officials and other government officials as well as the privacy community and the protection community. We thought we would formalize that and have a regular series of programs hosted by GW and organized jointly with the Forum. We’re also taking interns from the law school – recent graduates or current students – to help us with our work. That’s another aspect of the relationship which we think is terrific.

Bentley: When your interns come in, do they come in with proposals regarding the area in which they would like to work, or are their assignments made based on what the Forum sees as hot topics in privacy at the time?
Wolf: Well, we’re focused on a small handful of issues to keep from spreading ourselves too thin, and these are the “hot” issues today. So when the students come in, typically they will work on our major projects.

Bentley: What are those?
Wolf: Behavioral profiling, smart grid technologies, and to a lesser degree, mobile devices and smart networks and their ability to protect privacy.

Bentley: Can you give some examples of the things you will be looking at in terms of behavioral profiling?
Wolf: One of the things we are doing right now is creating, with an advertising firm and a consumer research firm, an icon that can appear in online ads that consumers can click to find out more about the ad – why it’s being tailored to them, what’s being collected, and thus giving the consumers more control.