Overview
1. The advancing privacy challenge
2. Help from the history of the evolution of privacy and technology
3. Possible responses to privacy in query logs: two unsatisfying approaches and one new possibility
Privacy Challenges in the Web's first decade
Characteristics of Today's Privacy Challenge
- Lots of personal information data
- held by lots of parties
- huge increase in analytic capacity and data integration techniques
- little time and attention to manage uses
- unclear rules when data crosses boundaries
Overall transparency is a major factor to query log-related privacy risks.
What Privacy Isn't
Saltzer and Schroeder (The Protection of Information in Computer Systems):
“The term “privacy” denotes a socially defined ability of an individual (or organization) to determine whether, when, and to whom personal (or organizational) information is to be released.”
Privacy's Boundaries - The Home
Historical foundations - the home
 |
"The house of everyone is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence, as for his repose...."Semayne's Case, All ER Rep 62 (Michaelmas Tern 1604) |
Privacy's Boundaries - The Home Breached
 |
"Ways may some day be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home.... Can it be that the Constitution affords no protection against such
invasions of individual security?"
Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 467 (1928) (Brandeis, J.,
dissenting) |
Privacy's Boundaries - New Privacy Protections
 |
"The Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection.... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protectedKatz v. United States. 389 U.S. 347 (1967) |
Privacy's Boundaries - New Challenges
 |
It would be foolish to contend that the degree of privacy secured to
citizens by the Fourth Amendment has been entirely unaffected by the
advance of technology...."
Kyllo v. United States. 533 U.S. 27 (2001) (Scalia, J.) |
One approach -- Information Hiding: Privacy Sensitive Data Analysis
Goal: construct data base protocol that limits
information access according to a formal definition of privacy
Privacy Definition: indistinguishability of the
individual from the community
Method: measures epsilon-indistinguishability of a database
query transcript
Differential
Privacy, Cynthia Dwork, 33rd International Colloquium on Automata,
Languages and Programming, ICALP 2006, Part II, pp. 1–12, 2006.
see also Sweeney's k-anonymity work
Questions upon the Success of Privacy Sensitive Data Analysis
A privacy-safe zone: Privacy sensitive data mining establishes a boundary,
which, if respected, assures no privacy risk to the individual.
- how do you know that data usage remains within the privacy-safe zone:
- over time?
- across an institution?
- what legal rules outside the privacy-safe zone?
Another approach -- Consent and its limitations
IRB's & basic privacy notice & consent model. Can today's privacy model (EU or US) be sufficient going forward?
Key will be purpose limitation, but we have a dilemma...
- narrow purpose definition -> lots of choices = large time investment
will yield privacy protection and low flexibility
- broad purpose limitation -> few choices = small time investment
required but less control and less privacy protection
Dilemma: limited individual and regulatory capacity to
control escalating data collection.
Current result of consent dilemma +
increased inference power: strict about what's collected but loose about
usage
Better result: loose about what is
collected and strict about usage
Toward Another Approach...
- How many believe you are subject to law (any law)?
- How many of you follow (most) laws? [exclude speed limits]
- How many of you read all the laws to which you believe you are
subject?
- How many have been to a court of law?
Information Accountability Through Policy Aware Systems
General view (amongst the 'digerati'): law has to catch
up with new technology.
General question: how will laws catch up?
My question: How will the Web finally catch up with the
'real world'?: in everyday life, the vast major of 'policy' problems get
worked out without recourse to legal system.
Design goal: instrument the Web to provide seamless
social interactions which allow us to avoid legal system the way we do in the
rest of life
Global perspective: In the shift from centralized to decentralized
information systems we see a general trend:
ex ante policy enforcement barriers -> policy description
with late binding of rules for accountability
Discussion and More Information
For more information see:
- MIT Decentralized Information Group: http://dig.csail.mit.edu/
- Transparent, Accountable Datamining Initiative (TAMI): http://groups.csail.mit.edu/dig/TAMI
- Policy Aware Web project (PAW): http://www.policyawareweb.org/
- Feigenbaum and Weitzner (eds.), "Report on the 2006 TAMI/Portia Workshop on Privacy and Accountability."
- Weitzner, Abelson, Berners-Lee, Hanson, Hendler, Kagal, McGuinness,
Sussman, Waterman, Transparent
Accountable Data Mining: New Strategies for Privacy Protection,; MIT
CSAIL Technical Report MIT-CSAIL-TR-2006-007
[DSpace handle]
(27 January 2006).
Work described here is supported by the US National Science Foundation
Cybertrust Program (05-518) and ITR Program (04-012).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
