Winners IIR National Privacy Innovation Award 2015 announced

Today, the IIR National Privacy Innovation Awards 2015 were presented to companies and institutions that are committed to privacy within their organisations and/or offer privacy-friendly solutions. From a large number of entries, about five companies were nominated from which two winners were chosen. Privacy Perfect in Business solutions category, the company Ixquick in the Consumer Solutions category and Whitebox Systems that received the incentive award as a start-up.

IIR National Privacy Innovation Awards

The IIR National Privacy Innovation Awards are for governments, companies and organisations that stand out in a positive way in adopting privacy-friendly services or applications within their organisations. There are 4 categories in which entries could be nominated:

• Business solutions

• Consumer solutions

• Government services

• Start-ups.

Initial selection consisted of screening for nominations on how the following are handled:

• Having a privacy officer in the organisation

• Application of a privacy policy

• Applying risk analysis

• Privacy awareness in the organisation

• An insightful privacy policy and communication of this

The participants nominated were then screened on issues such as innovativeness, technological innovation, the business model, scalability of the solution, type of implementation and contribution to Netherlands Privacy Guide Country.

Jury of the IIR National Privacy Innovation Awards

The jury consisted of the following:

• Paul Korremans (member), vice-chairman Netherlands Society of Data Protection Officers

• Dr John Borking (member), EuropriSe GmbH, former vice-president of the Dutch Data Protection Authority

• Drs Bas Filippini (jury chairman), chairman Privacy First Foundation.

Nominations

From the submissions, the following companies have been nominated:

• Privacy Perfect, a company specialising in data mapping & governance for conducting privacy impact analyses within companies in relation to the new European laws and regulations;

• Pseudonymise, a company that acts as a third party to data requesters and providers, encrypting the data from the identity associated with it;

• Ixquick, a privacy-friendly search engine that acts as a third party for searches to Google and other search engines so that the identity behind the search is not known to these search engines;

• Qiy, a platform for pseudo-IDs for surfing and buying anonymously on the internet;

• Whitebox Systems, an encrypted mode of selective data exchange of patient data under physician confidentiality.

Winners IIR National Privacy Innovation Awards 2015

The Awards were presented at the annual National Data Protection & Privacy Congress of the well-known training and seminar organisation IIR at the Westcord Fashion Hotel Amsterdam, which was attended by more than 80 participants.

"The winners are important forerunners in a new industry in which the Netherlands can become an international Privacy Guide Country. Where environmental pollution is a negative by-product of the industrial revolution, privacy violation is that of the information revolution," said Bas Filippini, chairman of the jury.

"Privacy Perfect responds excellently to this trend by facilitating privacy impact scans and improving privacy measures in organisations. With a customer-friendly software dashboard, quick and effective insight can be gained into the state of an organisation's data management and it is up-to-date on a daily basis. An excellent solution that can also catch on internationally.

Ixquick is a company that is profitable with a privacy-friendly anonymous search engine that already serves millions of searches especially in the US and Germany. The company will now also launch a paid anonymous email service with no message storage and analysis, acting as tomorrow's Internet Post Office.

Finally, as a jury we have to Whitebox Systems awarded the start-up encouragement prize, as this solution puts medical confidentiality at the centre and is also already being actually used in practice by a number of GPs. "It would be good for the entire healthcare sector if this company is taken a good look at instead of the current centralised and ICT-centric health insurance platform LSP," Filippini said.