Sunday, November 11, 2012

“A man’s home is his castle”

“A man’s home is his castle”. This aphorism invokes many emotions tied to our notions on privacy. Our courts have reached another decision when we travel from the physical world to our digital world. Daniel Reed in “Information Privacy: Changing Norms and Expectations” offers three ideas about the future of personal online information management. 

 The first two could be binary access specifications that can be embed into the content. The content would be encrypted so that only users who know the public encryption key of the content owner and use a viewer that has the binary access specifications built into it would be able to view the content. The two binary access specifications are… 

 1. Bounded lifetime. An end of life attribute that can be embedded into media content that I upload to the Internet. Any pictures of me during college or high school I might want to have an end of life once my college life is over. 

 2. Transitivity of access. An attribute that controls how far my content can travel. It allows me to say this content can be shared within my group of friends but my friends cannot share it outside of my group I tied to this content. 

 The usability of UI for privacy and security deserves far more attention than it is getting. This is not a vendor problem but belongs to content owners, individuals who view others content and system providers. Privacy specifications must be made far simpler and more intuitive. Content owners who post content to the Internet must understand their roles in privacy for themselves and others. Individuals who use or transmit content of others must understand the implications of their actions. Vendor or system providers must provide tools to control the ownership and privacy of our content. 

 Is anyone listening at Facebook, Yahoo, or Google???

ACM Blog Information-privacy-changing-norms-and-expectations/fulltext