Re: privacy definitions -- was: WebID questions

On 28 September 2012 15:26, Jonas Hogberg K.O
<jonas.k.o.hogberg@ericsson.com> wrote:
> At
> http://blogs.kuppingercole.com/kearns/2012/09/25/in-search-of-privacy/?goback=.gde_3480266_member_168314336,
> Dave Kearns writes:
>
>
>
> There is indeed a lot of confusion about the subject, but there are two key
> phrases to remember when talking about privacy:
>
> Privacy is not anonymity
> Privacy is not secrecy

Quoting those out of context is not particularly helpful. But for more
on why anonymity is important for privacy...

http://www.links.org/?p=123
http://www.links.org/?p=124

Also the many blog posts which link to those.

>
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: Henry Story [mailto:henry.story@bblfish.net]
> Sent: 28 September 2012 13:49
> To: Henry Story
> Cc: Carvalho Melvin; public-philoweb@w3.org; Ben Laurie;
> public-webid@w3.org; Oshani Seneviratne
> Subject: Re: privacy definitions -- was: WebID questions
>
>
>
>
>
> On 28 Sep 2012, at 13:46, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> On 28 Sep 2012, at 12:50, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> On 27 September 2012 21:09, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:
>
> I think we have a problem with divergent understandings of what privacy
> amounts to,
> and we should clarify this divergence. More below.
>
> On 27 Sep 2012, at 14:45, Ben Laurie <benl@google.com> wrote:
>
>> On 27 September 2012 13:11, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 27 Sep 2012, at 13:10, Ben Laurie <benl@google.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 27 September 2012 12:01, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:
>>>>> I forgot to reply to this comment:
>>>>>
>>>>> On 27 Sep 2012, at 12:13, Ben Laurie <benl@google.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> The W3C does not seem to agree -
>>>>>> http://www.w3.org/2011/tracking-protection/drafts/tracking-dnt.html
>>>>>> claims
>>>>>> that some people do not want to be correlated across sites.
>>>>>
>>>>> Yes. We are not saying they MUST be  correlated across sites, and we
>>>>> are not
>>>>> removing the freedom of people who wish not to be correlated.
>>>>>
>>>>> When I go to a web site I don't have to click the login button. f I
>>>>> click
>>>>> the login button and it asks me for a certificate I don't have to
>>>>> choose one
>>>>> with a WebID - or choose one at all for that matter.
>>>>>
>>>>> The browser UI people could add a field in the certificate login
>>>>> selection
>>>>> box for an origin-bound-certificate perhaps. I am not sure how they
>>>>> should
>>>>> present this, nor what the advantages or disadvanteges of doing that
>>>>> would
>>>>> be,  and it is outside the scope of the discussion here.
>>>>>
>>>>> But if I want to login with an identity I have on the web, and I want
>>>>> this
>>>>> to be correlated, then I don't see why that freedom should not be
>>>>> available
>>>>> to me.
>>>>>
>>>>> I am just saying that practically most people will not want to have
>>>>> 10000
>>>>> identities. Certainly if we restrict ourselves to identities that they
>>>>> want
>>>>> to use for correlation, it seems unlikely that people can cope with
>>>>> more
>>>>> than a handful or find it useful.
>>>>
>>>> I find a standard that is not interested in helping people who want to
>>>> log in _and_ have privacy to not be very interesting.
>>>
>>> That is stated so generally it is difficult to make much of it.  You seem
>>> to want Origin-bound-certificates it seems as described here:
>>>
>>> http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/81/slides/tls-1.pdf
>>>
>>> ( though the criticism of TLS certificates on slide 3 is wrong as I have
>>> already explained in
>>> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webid/2012Sep/0093.html )
>>>
>>> I pointed out in my reply above that perhaps origin bound certificates
>>> could be tied  into a user experience with normal browsers and normal
>>> certificates. I don't see why there should  be a standard that solves both
>>> problems, or why they could not work together.
>>>
>>> Now this still leaves you with the option of thinking that the problem
>>> you really care about - secure login to one site - is the one and only truly
>>> honest problem that an engineer needs to solve who is concerned about
>>> privacy. Let me spend a little time disabusing you of that understandably
>>> simple and appealing idea.  Consider:
>>>
>>> 1. What kind of privacy do you get if you log into one site (say with
>>> Origin-bound certificates ) and it offers everything to you: your social
>>> networks, your films, your news, your search, etc... Is that really privacy?
>>>
>>> 2. What incentive do you have when you go to a different site, and you
>>> log in there completely fresh? Let us imagine that that is the only thing
>>> you CAN do when you login to a new site: perhaps linked data and WebID have
>>> been made illegal in this world. So you arrive at this new site, and the
>>> number of people you can interact with is inevitably less than on mega-co's
>>> servers. You may find that cool. But where do you think the rest of humanity
>>> is going to end up on? And what does that do to your privacy when they tweet
>>> more and more where they saw you, what you told them, and in any case all
>>> the communication you send them has to go through megaco's servers.
>>>
>>> So consider why and how you came to think that "login and privacy" were
>>> the only thing to merit your attention. Also consider why you think that
>>> login and identity don't equal privacy. Say you have a freedom box and I
>>> have mine, and I go to your server and authenticate and post a picture. The
>>> only two people who can see the picture are you and me. Where is there a
>>> privacy gap there?
>>>
>>> I believe you are serious in your desire for privacy. And I respect that.
>>> But I think by not taking into account the network effect, by not noticing
>>> the many folded nature of reality, you end up working against your own
>>> values, and discarding solutions that could help you achieve your aims. So I
>>> do urge you to consider WebID as another tool to help create a more just and
>>> less asymetric space for us to live in, where we can all enjoy greater
>>> privacy and security.
>>
>> I've talked about many issues with WebID, why do you think privacy is
>> my sole concern?
>
>
> You said "I find a standard that is not interested in helping people who
> want to log in _and_ have privacy to not be very interesting." But why would
> you think that WebID does not enable privacy?
>
> I then put that together with your earlier statement "that some people do
> not want to be correlated across sites."
> Referring to a document on DO-NOT-TRACK by the W3C. It seems that you think
> that being correlated across sites (in any way) is a privacy problem.
>
> If I put these together then it seems to me that you are thinking that a
> fundamental requirement for privacy is that one not be identified across
> sites in any way. You seem to exclude the possibility that I wilfully be
> identifying myself across a site, as one that cannot be privacy enhancing.
> Or else why would you think that WebID cannot be an option for people who
> are keen on privacy?
>
> My understanding of privacy starts from a different intuition. A
> communication between two people is private if the only people who have
> access to the communication are the two people in question. One can easily
> generalise to groups: a conversation between groups of people is private (to
> the group) if the only people who can participate/read the information are
> members of that group....
>
> So now imagine that you and I and each member of this mailing list have
> their own freedom box [1] . A freedom box is a one person server that serves
> only the person in question. I am purposefully taking an extreme example to
> make the point. Now lets imagine you put a picture of our future meeting at
> TPAC in late October - I hope you will be able to come - onto your freedom
> box, and tag the people who appear in that picture taken later at night in a
> bar. You may not want to make it public until and unless all the members who
> have appeared in the picture accept that picture to be public. So to keep it
> close to our current technology, let us say you send them an e-mail with the
> link to the page containing the pictures. You don't want all the people on
> the web who see that URL as it passes unencrypted through the etherspace to
> be able to also click on the URL and see the picture. So you add an access
> control rule to your page that only allows the people who were designed in
> the picture - by WebID - to access to those resources. On receiving the mail
> the tagged people can click on the picture's URL, authenticate with WebID,
> and see the picture. Anybody else who tried would not be able to see it: 403
> Access Forbidden. Now I would say that those pictures are protected for
> privacy - they are not public, and only visible to the designated group -
> and you have used WebID in the process of making sure they were kept
> private. There was no third person in the loop that also saw the pictures.
> Only those people you wanted to could see them.
>
>>
>> My point was this: if your response to a desire for privacy _amongst
>> many other things_ is "then don't use WebID" that seems like a
>> deficiency in WebID to me, and one that makes it a lot less
>> interesting to me.
>
> I was only saying: if you want to log into a site without using a WebID
> based certificate, then don't use a WebID based certificate. But don't think
> that by doing that you are guaranteeing your privacy. As I explained if
> there is only one big web site to rule them all and you log into it without
> webid, whatever you post there will be seen not only by the people you
> wanted to have it visible to, but also by the owners of the site. In our
> Freedbom Box scenario that is not the case. So this is a case of showing how
> having a global identity that the user can control enhances privacy.
>
>
> FYI: Eben Moglen defines privacy as follows:
>
> Which brings us I will admit to back to this question of anonymity, or
> rather, personal autonomy. One of the really problematic elements in
> teaching young people, at least the young people I teach, about privacy, is
> that we use the word privacy to mean several quite distinct things. Privacy
> means secrecy, sometimes. That is to say, the content of a message is
> obscured to all but it's maker and intended recipient. Privacy means
> anonymity, sometimes, that means messages are not obscured, but the points
> generating and receiving those messages are obscured. And there is a third
> aspect of privacy which in my classroom I call autonomy. It is the
> opportunity to live a life in which the decisions that you make are
> unaffected by others' access to secret or anonymous communication.
>
> http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2012/freedom-to-connect_moglen-keynote-2012.html
>
> Would this be an acceptable working definition for this thread?
>
>
>
> Eben Moglen makes a good case against (unnecessary) centralisation of
>
> information in services  that you are not in control of. Note, that
> sometimes
>
> I do want  information not to be on my server: say if I get a degree from
>
> a university,  it has more value if the university states that I have the
> degree,
>
> than if I state it. Every person or organisation is a node in the publishing
> system.
>
>  What is problematic is the loss of autonomy that could arise by giving away
>
> all one's information too easily. It won't happen simply because there are
>
> many organisations that are legally obliged to control those processes:
>
> e.g. health care organisations, companies (about their employees), armies,
>
> police departments, universities, etc...
>
>
>
> Eben Moglen brings up the topic of autonomy but does not develop
>
> it far enough. This is a very interesting topic that would be worth
> discussing
>
> on the Philosophy of the Web Community Group
>
>    http://www.w3.org/community/philoweb/
>
>
>
> For the purposes of the argument here, I think the simple definition of
>
> privacy that I gave is sufficient. For a much much more researched
>
> analysis, also to be developed on philoweb, see the book by Helen
>
> Nissenbaum "Privacy in Context"
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Context-Technology-Integrity-Stanford/dp/0804752370
>
>
>
> If we put that together with work on speech acts starting from Austin,
> Searle,
>
> the debate with Derrida, ... and we put that together with HTTP considered
>
> as document acts, as I argue following Dan Conolly in my Philoweb
> presentation
>
> around 1/3 of the way in,
>
>
>
> forgot the link:
>
>  http://bblfish.net/tmp/2010/10/26/
>
>
>
> then we can see how this ties in with work done by
>
> Oshani in her "usage restriction management" paper
>
>
>
> http://dig.csail.mit.edu/2011/Papers/IEEE-Policy-httpa/paper.pdf
>
>
>
> Essentially Nissenbaum argues that the context in which information is given
>
> to someone is what determines privacy rules. We need to find some mechanism
>
> to declare those contexts in our ReadWriteWeb servers, and Oshani has
>
> made some first steps in that direction.
>
>
>
>    But I don't think we should - nor can we - try to solve all issues here
> in this thread.
>
> But still it is useful to see where we are located in conceptual space here.
>
>
>
> Henry
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Henry
>
>
> [1] http://freedomboxfoundation.org/
> [2] http://www.w3.org/2012/10/TPAC/
>
>
>
> Social Web Architect
> http://bblfish.net/
>
>

Received on Saturday, 29 September 2012 17:50:57 UTC