---
title: "Privacy Academy"
description: "Stop me if you've heard this one: A hacker, a privacy commissioner, and Microsoft's identity architect walk into a casino..."
date: "2005-11-01"
authors:
  - name: "Susannah Fox"
    job_title: "Former Researcher"
    link: "https://www.pewresearch.org/staff/susannah-fox/"
url: "https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2005/11/01/privacy-academy/"
categories:
  - "Online Privacy & Security"
  - "Privacy Rights"
---

# Privacy Academy

Last week’s [Privacy Academy](http://www.privacyassociation.org/academy/) event in Las Vegas was an opportunity for me to meet an amazing range of privacy professionals, including:

[Kevin Mitnick](http://www.kevinmitnick.com/), hacker extraordinaire, who described how he not only convinced a Motorola employee to give him some secret code, but taught her over the phone how to zip it into a single file in order to ftp it to his site!

[Ann Cavoukian](http://www.ipc.on.ca/), Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, who told a [startling tale](http://www.ipc.on.ca/docs/ho-001-exsum.pdf) of patient records swirling around downtown Toronto, mistakenly dumped by a recycling company to recreate the 9/11 chaos of Lower Manhattan for a movie shoot.

[Kim Cameron](http://www.identityblog.com/), Architect of Identity for Microsoft, who talked about how they are working on a cooperative effort to solve the patchwork of identity work-arounds that we all deal with online.

It was also an opportunity for me to pull together our findings on spyware, phishing, and consumer attitudes in a new way, which you can read [here](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/PPF/r/49/presentation_display.asp).