LIVE FROM GSMA MOBILE 360 – PRIVACY & SECURITY, THE HAGUE: KPN, Huawei and others chewed over where the privacy line should be drawn in a lively debate.

Jaya Baloo (pictured), KPN’s CISO, raised questions about the FBI’s recent high profile hack of an iPhone. “What data is on the device that is not available elsewhere? What data is uniquely on that phone that couldn’t be available from the operator or iCloud?” she asked.

She also questioned the FBI’s claim that it would only use its backdoor once to access data on the phone. “It’s a sort of arrogance to think it will only use it once,” remarked Baloo.

Similarly forthright, John Howie, chief privacy officer – consumer business unit, Huawei, said it was a “huge problem” that no global legal framework existed for privacy, and potentially cyber security, in the era of IoT.

Laws tend to be local, he said. Even EU rules, which obviously have significant coverage, are not always ubiquitous. For instance, there is a suggestion that Denmark might opt out of the EUGDPR, the European Union’s data protection regulation, he pointed out.

Meanwhile, Matt Anderer, managing director, AMDP Americas, a consultancy, was moving in the opposite direction of much of the tech industry.

“Operators have to track me to give me the service I want, I have paid for. With that data companies know where I live, where I go shopping, where I go to church. Some people say that is a bad thing. Potentially let’s look at it not being a bad thing.”

He gave the example of an acquaintance who was without a smartphone when caught up in the recent terrorist attack in Brussels. She would have been better with her device, he contended.

He went on: “I get faster access because of cookies. I yield some privacy for convenience.”

“We need to have a debate, but let’s not have attack and defend, let’s have a debate and not do that. We need both privacy and security, not either or.”

Interestingly that echoed a comment by KPN’s Baloo: “Confronted with privacy versus security, we should not have a polemical decision.”