In this talk I will look to the future; what will sociotechnical
transformation that human societies are going through throw up next? What new
forms of data will present themselves and how will we use them? I will advance
the thesis that humans and their data are becoming increasingly tightly bound
and that the legal, administrative and social separation of personhood and data
about those persons will be crease to be useful or desirable. I will present
examples to show that we are already some way down this track. Such a thesis
throws up a supreme challenge to privacy; what could privacy even mean mean in
a society where our digital selves are as important as our physical selves and
our social selves straddle both? The answer, I will argue, lies in rebooting
our thinking about privacy to move from confidentiality based models to
autonomy based ones. Given such a rethinking the sociotechnical transformation
presents an opportunity as much as a threat.