RE: Lightning talk at W3C camp

What an interesting way to think about it! But then, I always enjoy your contributions here. 

Helen Nissenbaum gets a little bit at this when she writes about privacy in context. She says privacy controversies arise when online information collection and use diverges from the social norms of that interaction's most obvious IRL analogue. Any ideas as to whether that's translatable to an internet standards context? 

-----Original Message-----
From: Karl Dubost [mailto:karld@opera.com] 
Sent: 18 April 2012 16:25
To: Chappelle, Kasey, Vodafone Group
Cc: Mark Lizar; Marcos Caceres; Dan Brickley; Peter Kraker; public-privacy@w3.org
Subject: Re: Lightning talk at W3C camp

Agreed with Chappelle on 

Le 18 avr. 2012 à 10:51, Chappelle, Kasey, Vodafone Group a écrit :
> frameworks for information accountability are exactly what we're supposed to be doing here! I just don't know that we get any closer to that by starting from the idea that privacy is dead.   

Though I would widen it a bit. Privacy in most people's minds is something poorly understood (myself included) and often very binary. I do not buy Dan's first statement:

	"unexpected others aren't monitoring and 
	logging one's activities, e.g. to allow 
	anonymous or pseudonymous activities."

because we *all* do that all the time with our neighbors in the physical life. It is also basically part of the social contract.

So it is not exactly the act of recording which matters, but more something along the lines of:

* how much do we record?
  (geographical space, time, . )
* with which details?
  (granularity)
* how long do we keep?
  (memory, archives, )
* the scale of replications
  (duplication of copies of these data to others places)
* the quality of replications
  (duplication with missing or not informations)
* the speed of replications
  (how fast does it take to transmit this information)
* the ability to break the logic
  (lies, hiding, cheating)
* the reciprocity
  (what you know about me, what I know about you with the same effects)

In the context of the network: Speeds, Scales, Identical replications, etc. have become very dense concepts. It's why I use Opacity as in a fog in the forest. Depending on the fog context, you see more or less trees around you. Or if you reverse the observer position, different trees have a different image of you.

Another important thing is the reciprocity. In a system where parties have a much larger power, possibility to act upon these data that you have on these parties (knowing little about them), the trouble starts.

There is also something we tend to forget which is amazingly useful in our social relationship: lies and forgetting. The messages are forgotten and repeated with wrong information. This is a feature, not a bug. It allows a lot of flexibility for individuals and social relationships.

[1]: http://www.w3.org/2010/api-privacy-ws/papers/privacy-ws-3.html






-- 
Karl Dubost - http://dev.opera.com/
Developer Relations, Opera Software

Received on Wednesday, 18 April 2012 15:35:48 UTC