At WordCamp Vienna I retired from open source projects and contributions. The write-up of my talk explains why.

I gave this talk one last time in Freiburg, and you can read all about it here. In 2020 I’ll be challenging development communities to move beyond the basics.

In our volatile and uncertain times, developers like you can play a crucial role in protecting the safety and privacy of the people who use the things you build. Whether you enjoy the support of an employer or work on your own as a freelancer, taking steps to safeguard user privacy must become a part of your everyday development workflow.

This talk will provide a practical toolkit which draws on current and upcoming data protection regulation, the Privacy by Design development framework, and recognised best practices in protecting personal data to inspire attendees to integrate a healthy approach to privacy into everything they do.

The past two years have seen an explosion of privacy scandals ranging from data breaches to the manipulation of elections – and mobile apps have been right at the heart of them. How did our work become so badly abused, what might we have done differently, and how can we put things right for the future? Join me for some new perspectives on privacy, ethics, and reclaiming pride in our craft.

Ahead of 2019 I caught up with lead organiser Steve on his podcast.

Last year at Drupal Europe, representatives from Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress’s privacy initiatives met together and compared notes from our respective experiences in a friendly, mutually supportive setting. We realised that although our work is structured very differently from code, structure, and project governance perspectives, we had much more in common that that which divided us.

This led us to agree to put in a proposal to the Drupal project to formally support a permanent cross-project privacy working group. The idea is that by providing a common space for open source privacy teams to support each other through practical knowledge, code libraries, policy briefings, open standards, and the spirit of collaboration, we can help to raise the standards of user protection across the open web.

At Drupal London, we will provide an update on where the plans are, what we hope to achieve, and how you can get involved.

I spoke about the ups and downs of raising awareness of data protection in open source projects. The audience was full-time salaried data protection professionals, mostly based in central London, and many of whom are also privacy lawyers. As I has suspected it might be, it was a bit of a shock to them to learn about the theory and practice of doing what they do, but on a voluntary and unsupported basis.

Feedback: “It was fascinating. I had no idea of the dynamics of what goes into an open source project and am full of admiration for your passion and determination to get privacy built into websites from the beginning. More power to your elbow.”

Next year the UK leaves the European Union. What will this mean for the EU accessibility regulations which currently guide our work, the new accessibility legislation in the pipeline, and disability rights in general? Join me to learn what’s going, what’s staying, and what might get lost in transition. I will also provide an insider’s view of how European law is travelling through Westminster during the Article 50 process to its unknown destination.

This talk was built around an article I wrote for 24 Accessibility. The video is fully captioned.

Huge thanks to my sign language interpreter and live captioner from today. Now that's a real speaker's gift. https://t.co/XJbDUPoFp8

— Heather Burns (@WebDevLaw) November 9, 2018

The most important thing you will ever do as a developer is protect the people in your data. But beyond headlines, scaremongering, and scandals, what is privacy, and how do we develop for it? Before we can protect people from the harms that can result from the misuses of their data, we need to understand our own differing cultural and legal approaches to privacy, and then establish a common methodology to evaluate our work.

This talk will provide a overview of different views and approaches to privacy which exist within our globalised industry and even within our own projects. Then, it will provide attendees with a practical development toolkit which draws on best practice privacy standards, current and upcoming legal regulations, and robust development frameworks.

Attendees will be inspired to integrate a healthy, proactive, and accountable approach to privacy into everything they do.

(How’s that for talk feedback!)

I had the absolute privilege of joining Dries Buytaert (Drupal), DB Hurley (Joomla! and Mautic), Barb Palser (Google), and Tim Lehnen (Drupal Association) for a panel discussion on the future of the open web and open source at Drupal Europe in Darmstadt, Germany.