The current Polish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) will remain on his post for another, second term after the Polish Parliament confirmed his nomination on 25 July 2014. The decision did not come as a surprise: Wojciech Wiewiórowski was the only candidate for the post and has an excellent background for the role. Just like during the previous nomination process four years ago, EDRi member Panoptykon monitored the process, to ensure its transparency to the public.

Access of the law enforcement agencies and secret services upon more or less formal warrants and request do not cover the whole problem of the online surveillance. More and more date is available out there without any warrants – just to read, take and process. It is the situation, when the data that we all publish online, with more or less awareness of the consequences, is used by authorities mention above for whatever purposes. How purpose limitation could possibly be used to limit open source surveillance? To what extent privacy settings that by default enable or enhance making data public help in conducting this type of surveillance? How open source surveillance might influence individual?

Privacy is not about hiding things that we want to keep secret. It is about our right to choose, when, for what purpose and who can see certain data about us. It’s about control. Even data that might seem meaningless, like separate internet application logs or IP address that changes apparently with every new session, but put together they might reveal a lot about Internet user with surprising accuracy. We might lose track of what we have put online, but Internet doesn’t forget. It may even guess things that you never told anybody. Unfortunately usage of digital shadow, especially for profiling purposes, is not regulated by law. What can you do to reduce your digital shadow or stop others form using it against you?

This paper is aims to give a brief overview of the following issues: (i) Polish data retention regime and its drawbacks; (ii) the use of data retention in practice and available
data on the subject; (iii) campaign run by the Panoptykon Foundation over last two years; and (iv) political shifts that occurred in Poland.

Since the first stories revealing the extent of mass surveillance appeared in the Guardian in June 2013, the Snowden files have helped to shine a light on the government agencies who monitor the online activity of their citizens and the companies who collect their customers’ personal data. Julia Powles (University of Cambridge), Mike Harris (Don’t Spy On Us), Josh Levy (Access Now) and Katarzyna Szymielewicz (Panoptykon Foundation) in a panel chaired by James Ball (The Guardian) explore who owns our data, how to take control of our online lives and ask what is the future of our personal data.