Re: [ietf-privacy] Fwd: New Version Notification for draft-iab-privacy-considerations-03.txt

Fascinating!  So if the Geolocation says "Boston" your algorithms, based on past
behavior I presume, can pinpoint the location.
All the best, Ashok

On 8/8/2012 5:49 PM, Martin Thomson wrote:
> On 8 August 2012 15:37, Ashok Malhotra<ashok.malhotra@oracle.com>  wrote:
>> In the Geolocation work, one of the features that was discussed was an
>> option that would
>> provide an indistinct location such as the town or the county or perhaps
>> even only the country.
>> This adds fuzziness although not noise.  If you add noise then, in the
>> location case, you could end
>> up with an incorrect location which may not be acceptable
> Speaking as someone intimately involved in the research into location
> "fuzzing", the geopriv working group came to an interesting set of
> conclusions:
>
> First and foremost, don't bother.  Every algorithm we developed could
> be easily attacked or circumvented by someone who has more information
> than the fuzzer.  We had some good algorithms that would be really
> effective at hiding the location of someone who is moving randomly
> across salt flats, desert or ocean.  For real-world applications those
> same algorithms sucked.  Human beings are just far too predictable.
>
> Now I don't know this for certain, but - intuitively - this same
> conclusion most likely applies to other aspects of data minimization.
>
> --Martin

Received on Thursday, 9 August 2012 11:47:26 UTC