I will *agree with Robin

On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 2:48 AM, Nikos Fotiou <[email protected]> wrote:
> I will argue with Robin that "current laws describing 'personal data'
> omit a lot of data types that can adversely affect privacy". Take for
> example the work of Xie at al. about "De-anonymizing the Internet
> Using Unreliable IDs",
> (http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/80964/sigcomm09.pdf) who managed
> to track hosts  using their application layer activity.  As another
> example (and since we are talking about Internet protocols), I believe
> a user would not experience any problem if in every HTTP request was
> providing different, but compatible, user-agents (and in some cases
> even non-existing user-agents) (Yen et al. in "Host Fingerprinting and
> Tracking on the Web: Privacy and Security Implications"
> (http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/156901/ndss2012.pdf) mentioned
> that “ 60%-70% of HTTP user-agent strings can accurately identify
> hosts in our datasets”)
>
> Finally there are already networking applications in which such ideas
> are applied. Take for example the "Differentially Private
> Network-Trace-Analysis Tools", developed by Microsoft
> http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/b25759f8-db91-48a0-a1b5-87c21f9e3292/
> A network mangement protocol based on "fuzzy data" seems realistic to
> me.
>
> Best,
> Nikos
>
> On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 1:49 AM, Rhys Smith <[email protected]> wrote:
>> There are a few different approaches to this idea of data perturbation, but 
>> they are not always applicable, as Ashok points out. Typically this is 
>> mainly done in the database world where people are more interested in 
>> statistics over data sets rather than particular data elements. In this 
>> case, there are a few approaches - you can add "noise" with essentially a 
>> mean of zero thus not affecting the overall stats, you can swap data between 
>> data elements, and so on. These approaches do end up changing the 
>> statistical information eventually though, so it's usually a trade-off 
>> between privacy and utility (as always).
>>
>> I personally think it might be worth quickly mentioning the idea, but not in 
>> too much detail, just providing a link for further reading - this is a rich 
>> research topic in its own right and probably a bit much for most people…
>>
>> Best,
>> Rhys.
>> --
>> Dr Rhys Smith
>> Identity, Access, and Middleware Specialist
>> Cardiff University & Janet - the UK's research and education network
>>
>> email: [email protected] / [email protected]
>> GPG: 0xDE2F024C
>>
>> On 8 Aug 2012, at 23:37, Ashok Malhotra <[email protected]> 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
>>>
>>> All the best, Ashok
>>>
>>> On 8/8/2012 3:07 PM, Robin Wilton wrote:
>>>> Hi Nikos,
>>>>
>>>> I think that's a very interesting idea. Like you, I also think we probably 
>>>> underestimate the extent to which data minimisation and anonymisation 
>>>> techniques genuinely obscure personal data. And yet very often, they are 
>>>> the only answers to the question "What is 'Privacy By Design?'"...
>>>>
>>>> It could be that introducing noise or fuzziness into personal data is 
>>>> another candidate. Certainly, current laws describing 'personal data' omit 
>>>> a lot of data types that can adversely affect privacy - so rather than 
>>>> wait for the law to redefine 'personal data', perhaps we should change the 
>>>> nature of the data as you suggest.
>>>>
>>>> Yrs.,
>>>> Robin
>>>>
>>>> Sent from my iPod
>>>>
>>>> On 8 Aug 2012, at 22:48, Nikos Fotiou<[email protected]>  wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Dear all,
>>>>> This the first time I send something in this list, so I ask you
>>>>> beforehand to excuse me if this mail is out of scope.
>>>>>
>>>>> I was reading draft-iab-privacy-considerations-03.txt and I found it
>>>>> very interesting. However I have the feeling that Section 5 does not
>>>>> take into account the advances of the “private data analysis” research
>>>>> field. To my understanding research efforts in this field argue that
>>>>> data minimization and anonymization are not always enough, bringing as
>>>>> an example the incidence of the AOL anonymized logs. What is proposed,
>>>>> in order to protect users' privacy, is to lower the “data utility” by
>>>>> adding “noise”.
>>>>>
>>>>> IMHO a useful guideline for protocol designers would have been to
>>>>> encourage them to design protocols that can tolerate a level of noise
>>>>> (obscurity if you will) in the data provided by the users.
>>>>>
>>>>> Best,
>>>>> Nikos Fotiou
>>>>>
>>>>> On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 5:37 PM, Alissa Cooper<[email protected]>  wrote:
>>>>>> Feedback on this draft is welcome.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Begin forwarded message:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> From: [email protected]
>>>>>>> Date: July 16, 2012 3:04:37 PM EDT
>>>>>>> To: [email protected]
>>>>>>> Cc: [email protected], [email protected], 
>>>>>>> [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], 
>>>>>>> [email protected]
>>>>>>> Subject: New Version Notification for 
>>>>>>> draft-iab-privacy-considerations-03.txt
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> A new version of I-D, draft-iab-privacy-considerations-03.txt
>>>>>>> has been successfully submitted by Alissa Cooper and posted to the
>>>>>>> IETF repository.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Filename:      draft-iab-privacy-considerations
>>>>>>> Revision:      03
>>>>>>> Title:                 Privacy Considerations for Internet Protocols
>>>>>>> Creation date:         2012-07-16
>>>>>>> WG ID:                 Individual Submission
>>>>>>> Number of pages: 36
>>>>>>> URL:             
>>>>>>> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-iab-privacy-considerations-03.txt
>>>>>>> Status:          
>>>>>>> http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-iab-privacy-considerations
>>>>>>> Htmlized:        
>>>>>>> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-iab-privacy-considerations-03
>>>>>>> Diff:            
>>>>>>> http://tools.ietf.org/rfcdiff?url2=draft-iab-privacy-considerations-03
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Abstract:
>>>>>>>  This document offers guidance for developing privacy considerations
>>>>>>>  for inclusion in IETF documents and aims to make protocol designers
>>>>>>>  aware of privacy-related design choices.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>  Discussion of this document is taking place on the IETF Privacy
>>>>>>>  Discussion mailing list (see
>>>>>>>  https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-privacy).
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The IETF Secretariat
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
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