Re: [docs-and-reports] Privacy and Purpose Constraints (#15)

@eriktaubeneck yes, I still find the use of the term here confusing and in conflict with its meaning elsewhere.  

Typically, I think a purpose in this context would be "measurement of purchases resulting from advertising" not "to calculate a result of a certain class of function in aggregate form with a differentially private guarantee". The purpose of the data collected or how it's being used is not specified in explicit terms to the user as part of the technical guarantee of the cryptographic design of the system.

It can be very helpful to privacy goals to provide some technical guarantees. Existing data protection and privacy law is familiar with the concept of providing technical guarantees. For example, the principle in the GDPR following purpose limitation is data minimisation (sic), which includes limiting the data that is collected or processed by a party (for example, the data output of a privacy-preserving measurement aggregate calculation). That's the proposed contribution of this work -- that the data output is minimized such that the recipient never learns or accesses the individual user data at all.

Providing technical designs that limit the amount of output data and thus how it can subsequently be used in ways that might harm people's privacy is a valuable contribution, it's just something that we use different terms for than purpose limitation. Generally we would like to design Web technology that is more closely driven by use cases and not so easily re-used or abused for other purposes and we should come up with some terminology for that. I've occasionally used "fit for purpose" in describing that idea informally, but that's also not quite right.

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Received on Thursday, 20 October 2022 18:37:58 UTC