Long before the Snowden revelations or recent stirs about Cambridge Analyticas use of Facebook data, the Debian community was and continues to be very attentive about privacy aspects of using our operating system. Still, privacy is not a “core value” of Debian. It is not mentioned in our social contract nor in the policy manual. Because privacy is important to many in the Debian project and probably most of our users, we might like to discuss privacy aspects of the Debian operating system and the applications we deliver, develop guidelines to improve on it, and help our users to understand how to protect their privacy when using Debian. This becomes also more relevant because of new data protection laws, like the EU GDPR. This BoF should help us to clarify, whether we need to do something and what. Maybe develop a "Debian privacy manual"? Or create yet another team? Also, we can discuss whatever we like related to Debian and privacy. There is already a team packaging privacy related software, and another team, that is responsible for privacy of Debian infrastructure. But here we like to discuss privacy implications of the Debian OS to its users.
Speakers: W. Martin Borgert