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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. For example, UCAS, a charity set up to

help students apply to universities, has a commercial unit

that happily sells your email addresses to anybody who forks

out enough money in order to bombard you with spam. Yes, you

can opt out very often, 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 the ``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}}

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

disosal, 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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\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

up to. 

Why does privacy matter? Nobody, I think, has a conclusive

answer to this question. Maybe the following four notions

clarify the picture somewhat: 

\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 membee 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

      anybodies 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

not. For example, since I am working in academia, I am very

happy to be essentially a digital exhibitionist: I am happy to

disclose all `trivia' related to my work on my personal

web-page. This is a kind of bragging that is normal in

academia (at least in the CS field). I am even happy that

Google maintains a profile about all of my academic papers and

their citations. 

On the other hand I would be very peeved if anybody had a too

close look on my private live---it shouldn'd be anybodies

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---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). To correct such incomplete or

flawed 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.

This is an endless field. I let you ponder about the two

statements that are often float about in discussions about

privacy:

\begin{itemize}

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

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

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

to fear.''}

\end{itemize}

\noindent There are some technical problems that are easier to

discuss and that often have privacy implications. The problem

I want to focus on is how to safely disclose datasets. What

can go wrong with this can be illustrated with three examples:

\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 (appr.~500K). They

      removed names, but included numerical ratings as well as

      times of ratings. Though some information was perturbed

      (i.e., slightly modified).

      Two researchers took that 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: either by their ratings or by

      the dates the ratings were uploaded. 

\item In the 1990, medical databases were routinely made

      publicised for research purposes. This was done in

      anonymised form with names removed, but birth dates,

      gender, ZIP-code were retained.

\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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