Re: list of questions raised during ambient light privacy review

Thank you Nick, Robin and everyone who contributed to this list.

This will be very useful for the privacy guidance documents.

I'll have a go at putting the questions on the wiki (unless there is a kind volunteer willing to help me with this, please!). 
In the meantime, please continue to add your suggested questions to this thread.

Christine

On Apr 22, 2013, at 11:47 AM, Robin Wilton wrote:

> Nick - 
> 
> That's excellent, thank you!
> 
> I have one addition to suggest (something that occurred to me more recently than the discussion). It relates to two already-identified risks:
> 
>> 
>> * What other data could this record be correlated with? (e.g. the ISP)
>> 	[dsinger]
>> 
>> * If you had large amounts of this data about one person, what conclusions would it enable you to draw? (e.g. maybe you could estimate location from many ambient light events by estimating latitude and longitude from the times of sunrise and sunset)
>> 	[dsinger, tonyr]
> 
> The additional use-case I thought of has to do with what happens if you're able to correlate the ambient light events from two discrete devices. If they show the same event profile, you might infer that the two devices are co-located. That represents two kinds of privacy risk: (1) that you can infer that two people are (or were) co-located at a given time, and (2) that you can frustrate an individual's attempts to maintain separation of two "personas" (say, Home and Work) by having a dedicated device for each.
> 
> Hope this is useful - 
> 
> Robin
> 
> 
> Robin Wilton
> Technical Outreach Director - Identity and Privacy
> Internet Society
> 
> email: wilton@isoc.org
> Phone: +44 705 005 2931
> Twitter: @futureidentity
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 20 Apr 2013, at 04:34, Nicholas Doty wrote:
> 
>> Robin W. and others raised the point that it might be useful to consolidate the questions that different reviewers asked during privacy reviews of the Ambient Light API. I've tried to extract that list from those threads and included my results below (and marked the people that mentioned a question in [brackets]).
>> 
>> I do not yet believe that all of these questions must be asked/answered regarding every Web spec or API, that this list is exhaustive or usefully framed. But I think it might be a nice starting point. As Frank D. has noted, checklists are often a good first step towards systematic reviews.
>> 
>> * can the information be used (alone or in combination with other APIs / sources of information) to fingerprint a device or user?
>> 	[tlr, erin, npdoty, others]
>> 
>> * may I access to the information I created?
>> 	[karl]
>> 
>> * may I record it myself (locally)?
>> 	[karl]
>> 
>> * am I able to have actions on this personal record?
>> 	[karl]
>> 
>> * may I block partly or totally the record of the information?
>> 	[karl, tonyr]
>> 
>> * may I fake it? (think about fuzzy geolocation or voluntary fake location)
>> 	[karl]
>> 
>> * Is the data personally-derived, i.e. derived from the interaction of a single person, or their device or address?  (If so, even if anonymous, it might be re-correlated)
>> 	[dsinger]
>> 
>> * Does the data record contain elements that would enable such re-correlation?  (examples include an IP address, and so on)
>> 	[dsinger]
>> 
>> * What other data could this record be correlated with? (e.g. the ISP)
>> 	[dsinger]
>> 
>> * If you had large amounts of this data about one person, what conclusions would it enable you to draw? (e.g. maybe you could estimate location from many ambient light events by estimating latitude and longitude from the times of sunrise and sunset)
>> 	[dsinger, tonyr]
>> 
>> * Am I likely to know if information is being collected?
>> 	[wseltzer]
>> 
>> * How visible is its collection and or use?
>> 	[wseltzer, tonyr]
>> 
>> * Do I get feedback on the patterns that the information could reveal (at any instant, over time) so I can adjust behaviors?
>> 	[wseltzer]
>> 
>> * if a background event about the device is fired in all browsing contexts, does it allow correlation of a user across contexts?
>> 	[npdoty]
>> 
>> * can code on a page send signals that can be received by device sensors on nearby devices?
>> 	[npdoty, tonyr]
>> 
>> And while we're gathering checklists of questions, we might look at the old Morris/Davidson doc for Internet specification authors that had some questions related to privacy:
>> 	http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-morris-policy-considerations-00.txt
>> (In particular: "4. Questions about Technical Characteristics or Functionality" and then privacy discussion in Section 5.)
>> And the IAB Privacy Considerations for Internet Protocols contains lists of questions in the "Guidelines" section:
>> 	http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-iab-privacy-considerations-08
>> 
>> This satisfies my ACTION-2.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Nick
> 

Received on Monday, 22 April 2013 13:49:16 UTC