Today, we are faced with unprecedented opportunities of sensing and storing detailed data of human activities at a society-wide scale, because most of our activities are mediated by the ICT's. For instance, automated payment systems record the tracks of our purchases, search engines record the logs of our queries for finding information on the web, social networking services record our connections to friends, colleagues and collaborators, wireless networks and mobile devices record the traces of our movements and our communications.

Many companies collect gigabytes of information about their users every dayThese human data are at the heart of the idea of a knowledge society, and are causing the emergence of a data-driven computational social science: the analysis of our digital traces can help us understand complex social phenomena, such as mobility, economic trends, spread of epidemics, opinion diffusion, sustainability, and so on.

Every day people leave many traces describing their movements.The opportunities of discovering knowledge from human activity data increase with the risks of privacy violation, because these data may potentially reveal many facets of the private sphere of people. Maintaining control of our personal data is becoming increasingly difficult, while the digital traces of our whereabouts, interests, social relationships, and desires abound in the data warehouses of web corporations and telecom providers.

Many laws have been enacted internationally, which regulate the protection of personal data: the type of information that can be collected by service providers, and how this information can be stored and used. Often, the key idea is informed consent, given by the data subject to the service provider, to manage the personal data towards designated purposes. But regulations lag behind the tremendous pace of web and mobile technologies, confounded by the global level where big corporations operate.

Is there a chance to resolve the dilemma of knowledge vs. privacy? Can we achieve a technological ecosystem where the right to the protection of the private sphere can coexist with the right to access to knowledge as a common good? Can privacy protection scale up to a connected society, where living is mediated by the ICTs?

The three aspects Privacy Observatory wants to gather together: scientists, lawyers and societyWe can hope to face these challenges only with a truly holistic, multi-disciplinary approach, where scientists of many diverse disciplines, from computer science and data technologies, to law and ethics, to sociology and beyond, discover the words and actions of a novel dialogue, across the borders of common thinking. This online forum, the Privacy Observatory magazine, is a place designed for this dialogue, and we invite all interested people to get involved and contribute.