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\section*{Handout 7 (Privacy)}

The first motor car was invented around 1886. For ten years,

until 1896, the law in the UK and elsewhere required a person

to walk in front of any moving car waving a red flag. Cars

were such a novelty that most people did not know what to make

of them. The person with the red flag was intended to warn the

public, for example horse owners, about the impending

novelty---a car. In my humble opinion, we are at the same

stage of development with privacy. Nobody really knows what it

is about or what it is good for. All seems very hazy. The

result is that the world of ``privacy'' looks a little bit

like the old Wild West. Anything seems to go. 

For example, UCAS, a charity set up to help students to apply

to universities, has a commercial unit that happily sells your

email addresses to anybody who forks out enough money in order

to be able to bombard you with spam. Yes, you can opt out very

often in such ``schemes'', but in case of UCAS any opt-out

will limit also legit emails you might actually be interested

in.\footnote{The main objectionable point, in my opinion, is

that the \emph{charity} everybody has to use for HE

applications has actually very honourable goals (e.g.~assist

applicants in gaining access to universities), but in their

small print (or better under the link ``About us'') reveals

they set up their organisation so that they can also

shamelessly sell email addresses they ``harvest''. Everything

is of course very legal\ldots{}moral?\ldots{}well that is in

the eye of the beholder. See:

\url{http://www.ucas.com/about-us/inside-ucas/advertising-opportunities} 

or

\url{http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/mar/12/ucas-sells-marketing-access-student-data-advertisers}}

Another example: Verizon, an ISP who provides you with

connectivity, has found a ``nice'' side-business too: When you

have enabled all privacy guards in your browser, the few you

have at your disposal, Verizon happily adds a kind of cookie

to your

HTTP-requests.\footnote{\url{http://webpolicy.org/2014/10/24/how-verizons-advertising-header-works/}}

As shown in the picture below, this cookie will be sent to

every web-site you visit. The web-sites then can forward the

cookie to advertisers who in turn pay Verizon to tell them

everything they want to know about the person who just made

this request, that is you.

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\includegraphics[scale=0.21]{../pics/verizon.png}

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\noindent How disgusting? Even worse, Verizon is not known for

being the cheapest ISP on the planet (completely the

contrary), and also not known for providing the fastest

possible speeds, but rather for being among the few ISPs in

the US with a quasi-monopolistic ``market distribution''.

Well, we could go on and on\ldots{}and that has not even

started us yet with all the naughty things NSA \& Friends are

\begin{itemize}

\item \textbf{Secrecy} is the mechanism used to limit the

      number of principals with access to information (e.g.,

      cryptography or access controls). For example I better

      keep my password secret, otherwise people from the wrong

      side of the law might impersonate me.

\item \textbf{Confidentiality} is the obligation to protect

      the secrets of other people or organisations (secrecy

      for the benefit of an organisation). For example as a

      staff member at King's I have access to data, even

      private data, I am allowed to use in my work but not

      allowed to disclose to anyone else.

\item \textbf{Anonymity} is the ability to leave no evidence of

      an activity (e.g., sharing a secret). This is not equal

        with privacy---anonymity is required in many 

        circumstances, for example for whistle-blowers, 

        voting, exam marking and so on.

\item \textbf{Privacy} is the ability or right to protect your

      personal secrets (secrecy for the benefit of an

      individual). For example, in a job interview, I might

      not like to disclose that I am pregnant, if I were

      a woman, or that I am a father. Similarly, I might not

      like to disclose my location data, because thieves might

      break into my house if they know I am away at work. 

      Privacy is essentially everything which `shouldn't be

      anybody's business'.

\end{itemize}

\noindent While this might provide us with some rough

definitions, the problem with privacy is that it is an

extremely fine line what should stay private and what should

profile about all my academic papers and their citations. 

On the other hand I would be very irritated if anybody I do

not know had a too close look on my private live---it

shouldn't be anybody's business. The reason is that knowledge

about my private life usually is used against me. As mentioned

above, public location data might mean I get robbed. If

supermarkets build a profile of my shopping habits, they will

use it to \emph{their} advantage---surely not to \emph{my}

advantage. Also whatever might be collected about my life will

always be an incomplete, or even misleading, picture---for

example I am sure my creditworthiness score was temporarily(?)

destroyed by not having a regular income in this country

(before coming to King's I worked in Munich for five years).

To correct such incomplete or flawed credit history data there

is, since recently, a law that allows you to check what

information is held about you for determining your

creditworthiness. But this concerns only a very small part of

the data that is held about me/you.

To cut a long story short, I let you ponder about the two

statements that often voiced in discussions about privacy:

\begin{itemize}

\item \textit{``You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.''}\\

\mbox{}\hfill{}{\small{}by Scott Mcnealy (CEO of Sun)}

\item \textit{``If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing 

to fear.''}

\end{itemize}

\noindent An article that attempts a deeper analysis appeared

in 2011 in the Chronicle of Higher Education

\begin{center} 

\url{http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/} 

\end{center} 

\noindent Funnily, or maybe not so funnily, the author of this

article carefully tries to construct an argument that does not

only attack the nothing-to-hide statement in cases where

governments \& Co collect people's deepest secrets, or

pictures of people's naked bodies, but an argument that

applies also in cases where governments ``only'' collect data

\subsubsection*{Re-Identification Attacks} 

\begin{itemize}

\item In 2006, a then young company called Netflix offered a 1

      Mio \$ prize to anybody who could improve their movie

      rating algorithm. For this they disclosed a dataset

      containing 10\% of all Netflix users at the time

      (appr.~500K). They removed names, but included numerical

      ratings of movies as well as times of ratings. Though

      some information was perturbed (i.e., slightly

      modified).

      Two researchers had a closer look at this anonymised

      data and compared it with public data available from the

      International Movie Database (IMDb). They found that 98

      \% of the entries could be re-identified in the Netflix

      dataset: either by their ratings or by the dates the

      ratings were uploaded. The result was a class-action 

      suit against Netflix, which was only recently resolved

      involving a lot of money.

\item In 2006, AOL published 20 million Web search queries

\item Genomic-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) was a public

      database of gene-frequency studies linked to diseases.

      you only needed partial DNA information in order to

      identify whether an individual was part of the study —

      DB closed in 2008

\end{itemize}

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http://randomwalker.info/teaching/fall-2012-privacy-technologies/?

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/

http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1077&context=hcii

https://josephhall.org/papers/NYU-MCC-1303-S2012_privacy_syllabus.pdf

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