Yesterday was an excellent example of what makes the Anti-Spyware Coalition’s Public Workshops so exciting for members of the Anti-Spyware industry and the other organizations impacted by spyware. The ASC hosted its third Public Workshop at Harvard University Law School, in conjunction with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and StopBadware.org.

Steve Gibson offered a morning keynote to start the day off. He talked about how he came into the anti-spyware business, and what he saw as the inherent problems in modern network security. Steve also sat on the first panel of the day, which continued to explore the current state of spyware and malware and the fight against it.

Chris Boyd (aka paperghost) of vitalsecurity.org and FaceTime Communications, joined fellow spyware fighters from Earthlink and CAUCE to discuss the various international threats that they have been picking up recently in the second panel of the morning.

Over lunch, Cindy Southworth of the National Network to End Domestic Violence put a very real face on what can sometimes become a very academic discussion by conducting an informal chat with a survivor of domestic abuse whose abuser used various forms of spyware to track her.

In the afternoon, two more panels offered insights into the less technical side of the issue. John Palfrey of the Berkman Center, Ari Schwartz from CDT and Tracy Shapiro from the Federal Trade Commission had an in depth discussion of the current laws, both national and state, and the current bills that are moving through the US Congress.

Finally, representatives from some of the larger anti-spyware filtering, white-listing and black-listing efforts took to the stage to discuss non-software approaches to combating spyware. TrustE, StopBadware, SiteAdvisor and Google each talked about the work they’re doing to combat spyware by informing the user about the content they’re downloading, before they download it. An interesting discussion of user education ensued.

StopBadware and paperghost blogged the event, and Harvard video recorded the day. Keep an eye on the ASC website to see the video in the near future.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Consumer Privacy, Spyware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.