Joi Ito's Web

Mayor Nakada officially appointing me to committee member. I was one of the people who recommended the Mayor to the WEF to be chosen as a GLT. He became a GLT this year. At 38, he is one of the youngest mayors in Japan.

Today was the first meeting with the Mayor of Yokohama and the committee for personal information protection. I wrote about it before here. I was happy to finally meet the 4 other committee members who turned out to be very smart and a good variety of backgrounds. One human rights expert, one lawyer, one law professor, one computer security professor and me.

Now that the privacy bill looks like it is going to pass, we deliberated about a variety of things, regarding what Yokohama should do after it passes. We also talked about what to do about the 845,000 people who opted out of the national ID. Currently they are going to send a type of deletion record to the central government, but I pointed out that this list is also information about the people who opted out and in fact is maybe even worse if you consider the fact that this list could be used to profile the people opting out. I suggested that we try to come up with some sort of technical option for the people who opted out of the national ID that would let them benefit from Internet enabled local government services without registering for the national ID.

The Yokohama City government also noted that data for the people who opted out was created during the trial and that in fact they all actually had national ID's even though the opted out. The local government has asked the prefectural government and the central government to delete these records, but they have not complied.

This committee will not have a regular meeting schedule or formal output style but will meet as needed on an ad hoc basis as issues arise to deliberate on.