A secure democratic Net is a fundamental right

Yesterday at the EEMA European conference on Identity Management conference in Amsterdam, concerns were raised on the necessity of privacy protection. I'm not doubting the necessity of a concept like privacy, but I am concerned about the level of counter-productive awareness that is being generated on again "the concept of privacy". Some people seem to be highly concerned about the very unlikely potential of abuse of an electronic identity card, at times where the number of applications of such a card are still being counted. Hacking a system is always fun: it is an achievement, a personal victory on a thing and maybe on the efforts of people that have been working hard to get things established and that have tried to get things secured.100% security is simply impossible, achieving the lowest level of risk is; but it will always be balanced to reward and to cost. At times were every one has at least one fidelity card, being it frequent flyer, frequent shopper or something else; at times where our digital footprint has exceeded the amount of data we are capable of creating ourselves; and at times where there are more surveillance cameras than there are people; one can continue to be paranoid and be concerned about privacy on all of those systems. The development is there, there is no way back. But the human factor behind it remains manageable : TRUST. TRUST is the fundamental basis for our society to be able to work, if you can not trust anyone, you don't do business, you don't have a relation, you don't have friends, you will find it difficult to blog ... who will believe you ? People make mistakes, the human factor, those can be criminal and if we can avoid mistakes being made, we should by all means, even the technical and digital ones. But we should not forget that there were people that made these mistakes, people like you and me. A perfect system only exists in theory, we should continue to strive for perfection and to protect privacy. But this should only happen in evolution, by learning from mistakes, as a means to an end, not as a purpose in itself. I am concerned about privacy, like any normal human being would be if you hear about stolen identities, forgery, theft, crime, ... It will not prevent me from supporting the development of identity management systems, electronic identities, eID-cards, web services, ... because there is more to all of this, than just privacy. There is a world of people, expectations, developments, fighting inefficiencies, partnerships, futures and growth involved. This is constructive.