EU STOA High level conference on “Protecting online privacy by enhancing IT security”, 2015
2015 I was part of an expert conference on online privacy by the EU parliament.¹ Many of the proposals made then are real today.
They called in people with the deepest knowledge of the field and organized breakout sessions over three days to get their knowledge. At the closing meeting, an employee of the parliament expertly summarized the results.
They searched the path and then took it.
I have a lot more respect for the depth of expertise at the EU parliament since then.
So if you ask yourself why the EU is important, this is part of the reason.
¹: 07-12-2015 23:00 High level conference on “Protecting online privacy by enhancing IT security”
While this wasn’t a singular event (people all over the EU have continued to fight for privacy since then), it was a time when a lot of people from the field got together and actually gave the EU parliament the best information they could condense from their shared knowledge, with good preparation and coordination by parliament employees.
As an aside: That I was at that conference was the result of a chain of unlikely events involving an academic who knew the free software project I contributed to, state officials from STOA who contacted a privacy focused free software project built by a ragtag group of developers, and mailing list messages.
And on top of that the support of my wife who said “yes, that’s important, go there, I’ll make it work here”, so I was the one dev from the project who could actually make the time.