In the 21st century, the internet age has transformed the way we communicate and store information. The availability of stupendous quantities of information online raises issues about privacy, and access to and security of information – particularly very private information such as legal and medical matters. We now know that that security agencies scoop up and store data on a vast scale – and they do so forever. Who will use this information in the future? For what purposes? Does it matter that foreign governments may have access to all the medical and welfare records of Australians? Why should lawyers or doctors care about this? Where do their professional obligations to patient privacy end and ‘national security’ issues override these obligations? This is no longer just about one controversial patient or client – it is about the private data of all patients and clients. For the past decade, the pendulum of power balance between the citizen and the state has swung very much in the state’s favour due to Big Data and cheap IT. Public interest whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and new media publishers such as Julian Assange have pushed the frontiers of our understand of how far the process has gone. This talk will discuss how digital information can and should be protected, emerging issues around data sovereignty, and the hard choices health and legal professionals may soon be having to make in this space.

After earning her PhD from Monash, Dr Suelette Dreyfus became Research Fellow in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. Prior entering academia, she worked as a professional journalist, as a staff reporter for The Herald-Sun, and a contributor to The Age, The SMH, The Australian, ABC’s ‘Late Night Live with Philip Adams, The Independent newspaper in London, and numerous magazines and publications. She wrote the geek cult-classic book ‘Underground’ with Julian Assange (1997, 2011), which has been translated into 7 languages and made into two films. Her academic research is in digital whistleblowing, computer security, health informatics and e-Education. Her academic publications appear in a wide range of areas, from the Electronic Journal of Health Informatics and Emergency Medicine Australasia to the Proceedings of 21st Australasian Conference on Information Systems.