- From: David Singer <singer@apple.com>
- Date: Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:55:54 -0700
- To: Shane Wiley <wileys@yahoo-inc.com>
- Cc: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@gbiv.com>, Rigo Wenning <rigo@w3.org>, "public-tracking@w3.org" <public-tracking@w3.org>, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>
On Jun 1, 2012, at 14:44 , Shane Wiley wrote:
> David,
>
> I would of course word it differently :-) but yes this is generally the same debate. The issue is that those records don't represent your behavior unless someone uses them to try to determine your behavior.
They may represent my behavior and then become available to someone who I never agreed could know anything about me. Isn't that one of the essences of privacy - being able to choose who knows what about you? *Secrecy* is choosing things that *no-one* will know about me. Privacy is at least partly having some say over who knows what about you, isn't it? Yes, the actual harm happens when you become aware through some negative impact, of that unwanted information, but the privacy problem is with the information, not the later harm.
If the local drugstore keeps records of my non-prescription purchases, and later my insurance company discovers from them that I buy a lot of painkillers, and they later deny me health coverage because they suspect I have a condition, when did the privacy problem occur? It's somewhere in the keeping of records and their being available to the insurance company, isn't it? The denial of coverage (the thing I see) is ('just') a symptom.
I thought we settled this in Princeton...
David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.
Received on Friday, 1 June 2012 21:56:24 UTC