I am Rigo and I work for ERCIM, the European host of W3C. I started as Privacy Activity Lead and am now Legal counsel of ERCIM and W3C. I was involved in the work on P3P and on Do-Not-Track.

With ERCIM I have been involved in various data protection and privacy research projects. My current project is SPECIAL. I also coordinated a Web Security Project that organized a landmark Workshop on Pervasive Monitoring. I’m a fan of Linked Data.

I’m an Attorney at law at the Munich bar association working with the AFS law firm. I’m in the Board of the biggest German Legal Tech conference EDV Gerichtstag and Member of the scientific board of the biggest German technical Library TIB.

Working for W3C I have to use all browsers to test and see what they do.

Opera 12 has been my all time favorite. It was the browser that gave me at least some feeling of control (remember the famous F12 that put privacy at your fingertips)?

I was looking for a browser that was able to display the more modern things on the Web. And I found mainly browsers without or with hidden controls. I like Mozilla, but sometimes I don’t like their choices. This is how Vivaldi became my main browser. It is probably a cultural thing. Of course, I always use the latest Snapshot. It is very solid, so far.

Vivaldi has still some way to go to match the user control enabled by Opera 12, but I think they are on a good path. F2 is good, but there is no cool privacy section yet.

I joined the Ambassadors in the hope of stirring up some interest in a new type of modern privacy interface that helps data self-determination and enables what I call “computer-mediated consent”. This is something that would fit well with the European origin of the Vivaldi Browser. Computer-mediated consent is not ready for mainstream yet but merits exploration and testing in a real browser.

The other thing is that browsers are very bad at connecting to smart cards. But often eGovernment bureaucracy requires some kind of card. For the moment everybody, including Estonia, is circumventing this issue in some way. The disaster of the German eJustice communication system for attorneys called “beA” was partly caused by this shortcoming. I could go on and on, but I will stop now and hope to continue with this topic later.

Photo by Alejandro Escamilla on Unsplash.