LAS VEGAS- The (r)evolution of privacy in technology was tweeted tonight at the Develop 4 Privacy awards at the DEFCON 19 hacker conference in Las Vegas. 3rd Place went to Obscuracam (Guardian Project), 2nd place to tiqr (https://tiqr.org/), an open source authenticator, and the 1st prize award to Gibberbot (Guardian Project). The winning applications were developed using the principles of Privacy by Design. One of the winning developers, Harlo Holmes, Guardian Project's mobile app developer for the Android platform, spoke with us about Obscuracam, Gibberbot and her DEFCON experience. Holmes, a Facebook early adopter, talks about what the winning apps do to protect privacy, social networks and the societal goals at the Guardian Project. Privacy by Design policies and best practices are fast becoming the most resilient way to reinforce privacy values for technologies in the marketplace. "The Develop for Privacy challenge is a great way to raise awareness for principles of privacy by design at a developer and code level. Far too many developers think about putting their user in control of their data after the fact. By encouraging privacy from the start, we're raising awareness of how to design for privacy," said Andrew Lewman of the Tor Project. Contestants' apps were judged based on effectiveness, the quality of user documentation, source code, originality, portability, and performance. The DEFCON event judges were veteran privacy scholars and analysts who awarded priority to the protection of daily online chats & instant messaging and the first place win to Gibberbot. “This app demonstrates that advances in consumer technology don’t need to come at the expense of privacy, said Nicole Ozer, with event sponsor, ACLU of Northern California and the Demand Your dotRights campaign. “We’re hopeful that companies will start to bake in better privacy protections so that users don’t have to choose between using smartphones and keeping control of their private information.” Winning developers won't walk away with a lot of prizes, but their technologies will be among the most recognised and supported examples of Privacy by Design in the industry. In fact, their apps will an open source download for most users. Harlo Holmes, who was given a jacket by presenters, described her win for privacy as,"priceless".
