The Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference (or CFP, or the Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy) is an annual academic conference held in the USA or Canada about the intersection of computer technology, freedom, and privacy issues. The conference founded in 1991, and since 2000, it has been organized under the aegis of the Association for Computing Machinery. It was also originally sponsored by CPSR.
The twenty-first annual CFP Conference in 2011, "Computers, Freedom, and Privacy: The Future is Now", will be held at the Georgetown Law Center in Washington, DC June 14-16. Among the questions and issues that will be explored are: What is social media’s role in the charged democracy movement in the Middle East and North Africa; How can technology and social media support human rights, What is the impact of mobile personal computing technology on freedom and privacy? Are the courts, policy and decision makers ready to address freedom and privacy in a 24-7 connected world? Are our leaders techs savvy enough to make good legal and policy decisions regarding the deployment of smart grid, e-health records, the spread of consumer location based advertising? Cybersecurity, cloud computing, net neutrality, federated ID, ubiquitous surveillance: Are they passing fads or here to stay? [1]
The Fifteenth Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, which created this wiki page, was held in Seattle. The theme of this conference was equiveillance, the balance between surveillance and sousveillance. The equiveillance theme was reflected in the Opening Keynote Address, a panel discussion on equiveillance, and a pre-keynote sousveillance workshop, as well as a sousveillance performance.[2] In keeping with this theme, every conference attendee received a sousveillance system consisting of a "maybecamera" attached to each conference bag. Some of the 500 conference bags contained cameras transmitting live 24/7 video whereas others contained no camera, but merely the familiar camera dome. A third category of conference bag included some with a subtle but visible flashing red light behind the dome. Not all of the wireless web cameras had flashing red lights, and some of the flashing red lights were dummy devices that did not transmit video. The bags that did transmit video also updated various video displays around the conference hall, visible to conference attendees.