Privacy

April 23

A persistent fear throughout all of the Internet’s operation is the Internet’s treatment of a person’s own privacy. We have a hard enough time defining the term, much less determining what role it should play in deciding the whos, whats, and hows of Internet governance. Nevertheless, the Internet’s present evolution indicates that unless we spend time contemplating the reinforcing privacy online it way succumb to the interests of profitability, online behavior regulation, cybersecurity, and law enforcement. Today’s class will set a framework for classifying privacy issues and explore how these issues play out in online spaces.

Speaking in class this week will be several members of Berkman's Youth and Media Project, as well as our own TA David O'Brien.

Assignments

We have a granted a one week extension to the rough draft in light of last week's events. Please have those uploaded before class on April 30th.

Readings

• Daniel Solove, Understanding Privacy (Chapter 1)

• Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (Chapter 9)

• Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis, Blown to Bits (Chapter 2) (focus on pages 36-42: “Why We Lost Our Privacy, Or Gave it All Away”)

• danah boyd, Why Parents Help Children Violate Facebook’s 13+ Rule

• Lawrence Lessig, Code 2.0 (Chapter 7) (read “Solutions” through “Rules to Enable Choice About Privacy”)

• Johannes Köppel, The International Dimension of the SWIFT Affair

Optional Readings

• Hal Roberts and John Palfrey, The EU Data Retention Directive in an Era of Internet Surveillance

• Solveig Singleton, Privacy as Censorship

• Dan Solove, The Future of Reputation (Chapter 7)

• Chris Soghoian, 8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight

• Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov, Robust De-anonymization of Large Datasets (How to Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset) (Arxiv)

• Noam Cohen, It’s Tracking Your Every Move and You May Not Even Know It (New York Times)

Class Discussion

Please remember to sign your postings by adding four tildes (~~~~) to the end of your contribution. This will automatically add your username and the date/time of your post, like so: Asellars 15:29, 21 January 2013 (EST)

Daniel Solove concisely and accurately summarized the areas of consensus with regards to the definition of privacy when he stated that it encompasses, "(among other things) freedom of thought, control over one’s body, solitude in one’s home, control over personal information, freedom from surveillance, protection of one’s reputation, and protection from searches and interrogations." He also went on to point out that, “Privacy is a value so complex, so entangled in competing and contradictory dimensions, so engorged with various and distinct meanings, that I sometimes despair whether it can be usefully addressed at all.” These two statements probably best summarize where current thought on privacy is at this moment in world history. He goes on to emphasize how important privacy is, "Thus privacy is a fundamental right, essential for freedom, democracy, psychological well-being, individuality, and creativity. It is proclaimed inviolable but decried as detrimental, antisocial, and even pathological."

I see less problems with the actual definition of the core values which comprise privacy and more issues with drawing the borders of where privacy begins and ends. It can (more or less) be defined as the individual having his or her behavior, personal information and life protected from disclosure to anyone whom they wish to not share such information. One solution is to go back to the old paradigm of the good of the individual vs. the good of the collective. With this mindset, I believe there would be a constant shift towards the eroding away at individual privacy for the benefit of society, either real or perceived. Therefore, one must seek a minimal set of privacy rights which can either never be infringed upon, or can only be infringed upon after some sort of mechanism for "due process" has been put in place and followed and properly justified.

There are some who are criticizing police for their recent cordoning off and going house-to-house and searching for one of the suspects of the Boston Marathon bombings in Watertown Massachusetts. There are also those who believe, that while so many cameras in the city of Boston gave law enforcement an advantage in identifying the bombers, the sheer quantity of cameras allows the government too much power. I thought the crowd sourcing effort that the government used (posting pictures of who they strongly believed were involved in the bombing and then allowing the public to voluntarily come forward was an interesting and perhaps good example of a balance between privacy and security that can be struck in the future. With the popularity of social media such as Facebook and Twitter, such efforts have the potential to be very effective, although surely not without critics. Technology certainly makes the issue of privacy much more complicated. Data gathering via the internet, data mining tools and technologies, surveillance drones and public cameras all add further complications to the issue. CyberRalph 20:22, 21 April 2013 (EDT)

In my wiki post two weeks ago, on April 9th, I addressed issues surrounding online privacy. I noted that everything we do today is online, and as a result, we may all be hacked at some point in time. The assigned chapter this week by Abelson et al., Why We Lost Our Privacy, Or Gave It Away, further supports my claim with additional examples and relevant quotes.

"Technology creates opportunities and risks, and people, as individuals and as societies, decide how to live in the changed landscape of new possibilities [i.e., new technology]....We give away information about ourselves—voluntarily leave visible footprints of our daily lives—because we judge, perhaps without thinking about it very much, that the benefits outweigh the costs."

These two statements are equally relevant for this week’s discussion. A) Technology does indeed create opportunities and risks, and we as the users primarily see things from an opportunistic perspective—quite often, we don’t contemplate the risks. B) Based on our optimism and trust in the technological advancements that surround us, we give our personal information away continuously. Why? Because the benefits outweigh the costs: we need to pay our bills online, manage our finances online, purchase products online, sign-up for services online, and the list goes on. In some circumstances—when one is hacked, for example—the costs trump the benefits; yet, we remain optimistic overall, not because we necessarily want to, but because we need to.

Privacy today impacts all walks of life. RFID technologies, credit cards, supermarket loyalty programs, and beyond, capture personal data for countless reasons. As the consumers, we not only let this happen, but we don’t have a choice, unless we choose to live in a remote reality. Abelson et al. further states that, "we give up data about ourselves because we don’t have the time, patience, or single-mindedness about privacy that would be required to live our daily lives in another way." Privacy norms will inevitably continue to evolve in-line with technological advancements, and we as the ultimate users must therefore adapt accordingly.

The final quote worth highlighting comes from Zittrain’s article: "It is no wonder that people have come to distrust computer-based record-keeping operations. Even in non-governmental settings, an individual’s control over the personal information that he gives to an organization, or that an organization obtains about him, is lessening as the relationship between the giver and receiver of personal data grows more attenuated, impersonal, and diffused....Often [an individual] may not see [a record about him/her], much less contest its accuracy, control its dissemination, or challenge its use by others" (Report from the Blue-Ribbon Panel to the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare on computers and privacy).

I like this quote because it foreshadows today’s reality, from 40 years ago. Will this same reality be consistent 40 years from now? Will privacy take on new meanings as hacking becomes more prevalent? Will new industries emerge to protect online communications? How will we as users continue to adapt, to ensure our own privacy across diverse online frontiers?

I look forward to hearing you insights! Zak Paster 09:48, 23 April 2013 (EDT)