A few thoughts were stirred by this exchange That privacy is not a physical thing and so it can/will be challenging to educate consumers about what their choice are and mean to them.
I think the cognitive load on consumers will present a barrier to gaining consent that represents what it purports to be - 'informed'. Therefore a position that starts from least harm to a user's privacy seems appropriate. So without informed consent a default action to not processing the relevant data would seem correct Reducing the cognitive load could be approached initially by reducing the frequency a user has to go through privacy agreements? I hallucinate this would be helpful in this regard? How one creates a personal policy that can be utilised for such interaction and a framework for using this widely may in itself be a challenge?. Bryan -----Original Message----- From: ietf-privacy-boun...@ietf.org [mailto:ietf-privacy-boun...@ietf.org] On Behalf Of Robin Wilton Sent: 04 September 2012 10:33 To: S Moonesamy Cc: ietf-privacy@ietf.org Subject: Re: [ietf-privacy] draft-moonesamy-privacy-identifiers-00 This is (again) an excellent airing of the issues, I think. One theme it exposes is the difficulty of balancing two factors: 1 - achieving informed consent, when the target audience doesn't have a mature understanding of the problem, or isn't motivated to act on such understanding as they have; 2 - dealing with stakeholders who react as some did to Microsoft's "DNT by default" decision... i.e. by saying 'if you set a privacy feature to 'on' by default, it is not reliable because it can't be interpreted as an explicit user choice (and hence as an indication if consent). I like your point about design never being value-neutral... Wondering if there's a sense in which designers can acknowledge that and say "of course not; and these privacy-enhancing design values are legitimately preferable to those privacy-eroding ones"... Yrs., Robin Sent from my iPod On 3 Sep 2012, at 18:55, S Moonesamy <sm+i...@elandsys.com> wrote: > Hi Hannes, > At 08:17 03-09-2012, Hannes Tschofenig wrote: >> There are more documents that exist making this statement. > > Yes. > >> In the technical community there is no need to convince anyone that an IP >> address can be used to indirectly identify a person (typically through >> various database resolution steps). > > Agreed. > > The idea is also to show two different viewpoints, i.e. the technical side > and the non-technical side. > >> As such, I don't think there is a need to cite anything here. > > Ok. > >> Interesting. I thought that this is already fairly good. > > I would rate it as good as I don't see any other way. > >> The typical reader of an IETF draft is certainly not an average person. In >> fact it is probably a good thing that they do not read them... > > :-) > >> Well. You can hide your IP address to a certain text. What gets hidden with >> the IP address depends whether you use systems like Tor, VPNs, NATs, IPv4 / >> IPv6, etc. > > See my comment to Robin Wilton. > >> You may not ask "Do you want to reveal your IP address? YES / NO". However, >> what a user may want to do is to get a software it has confidence in that it >> preserves a certain degree of anonymity. They may, for example, download Tor >> (or a similar software from other groups). > > There is a somewhat related message about a question asked to a user at > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-tracking/2012Jul/0152.html Which > question to ask is a question in itself. > >> Then, these software developers should still be given the option to provide >> those users who care about their privacy to set the options correctly so >> that they get what they want (potentially with an impact on the service >> quality). > > That gets us into an "inevitable choice" discussion. One of general design > questions is about considering performance and cost as well as functionality. > If the difference in service quality is negligible, I'd say that it is a > 50/50 choice. If the difference is noticeable, I'd pick the 50/50 choice too > as nothing comes for free. If service quality is like degraded mode the > software developer does not have to worry too much about privacy being part > of the design. It has been argued that there is no such thing as a > value-neutral design. Decisions, whether it is about security or anything > else, injects a bias into the equation. > > >> I don't think that we are questioning the Internet architecture as such. >> >> For example, with onion routing you essentially have various forms of >> trusted intermediaries. With IPv6 and with MAC address generated interface >> identifiers you have a much stronger form of re-identification in IETF >> protocols than you had before and so it is OK to think about the privacy >> implications. > > Ok. > >> That's true. The idea is that the open standardization process in the IETF >> leads to technologies that exercise data minimization because different >> stakeholder with different interests participate in the standardization >> activity and therefore avoid excessive and unnecessary sharing of data. This >> of course assumes that there is some understanding of what privacy is and >> what goals we may want to accomplish. > > The above looks at this from a different angle. I am not disagreeing by the > way. The wall is the asymmetry of power. We can go around that wall with a > process where the various interests work together on finding a balance. We > could also move that wall around, or rather, move the boundaries so that the > problem can be less complex. > >> Definitely. The contextual nature makes it very difficult for certain >> protocols to make a clear cut. Then, there are other ways to deal with this >> situation - as we had been trying to do in Geopriv with user preference >> indications. > > There has been some nice work coming out of Geopriv. > >> Many of the privacy laws a build on the basis that someone is able to make >> that decision - either it is the end user or someone on his / her behalf. >> Think about children. Typically, you would assume that their parents make >> that decision. Then, in many cases we (you and me) also use tools to >> outsource some of the decision making and to delegate it to people we trust. >> For example, if you download Ghostery or Adblocker for usage with your >> browser you decide to rely on specific companies to decide what to block and >> what not. > > Privacy laws vary, i.e. it depends on the culture of the region. In some > regions it is left to the individual to make the decision. In some regions > society is viewed as having a responsibility in helping the individual make > the decision. In some respect, it could be about delegation of trust. > >> That's a good point. We had been discussing this issue while working on the >> privacy considerations document and we said that we wouldn't mandate >> anything (particularly since the enforcement would only come through the >> community and through the IESG - not the IAB). Particularly at the early >> phase of our work on the privacy guidelines we weren't quite sure whether >> the level of privacy understanding is actually mature enough. > > Agreed. > >> However, some time has passed and the privacy guidelines document is stable >> now. So, it might be interesting to hear what the community thinks. > > Yes. > > Regards, > S. Moonesamy > _______________________________________________ > ietf-privacy mailing list > ietf-privacy@ietf.org > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-privacy _______________________________________________ ietf-privacy mailing list ietf-privacy@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-privacy _______________________________________________ ietf-privacy mailing list ietf-privacy@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-privacy
