Early 2006, NSA was involved in large scale eavesdropping on telephone communication.
- DARPA Total Information Awareness Program
- TSA’s Secure Flight Initiative
Tension between Internet Privacy and legitimate needs of law enforcement
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Anonymity helps facilitate free-speech.
- Whistleblowers may not be able to speak on a topic in fear of personal safety risk or loss of their jobs and/or status. Also consider the harm of anonymity, and how it may be used by evil organizations.
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Security and privacy are not opposites, but often conflict.
What Is Privacy?
- Within context of information collection, storage, and use:
- Privacy is the expectation that information about you, which is not generally known, will not be disclosed.
- Privacy Invasion can be defined as something that would cause you to change your behavior, an intrusion.
- Example, purchasing items with cash so they cannot be tied back to you
Identification
Pseudonyms offer a way to protect privacy.
- Example is female authors using male names to guard their private life from the public and be taken seriously. Pseudonyms can also be harmful, for example, stalkers and predators can use them online.
Log Analysis and Data Mining
Pattern of someone’s behavior can reveal a lot about someone.
- For example, if someone searches up a disease, and then sites on bone marrow registries, then it could lead to a conclusion that the person’s child has been diagnosed with a specific disease.
- This guess can be seen as an invasion of privacy. Other inferences can be based on items purchases online, emails received, or time when accesses occur.
Results of inferences can be used for directed marketing, public health studies, or reducing coverage under health insurance policies. These can also be used for targeted fraud or extortion.
Law enforcement has also proposed use of similar techniques to identify criminals.
- Observe someone who seeks information on growing marijuana and objects that may be used to facilitate growth, and enforcement can find their operations.
- Same with explosives and terrorists.
Long Term Storage & Processing
Storing data and processing it is very cheap now.
- Collecting and selling data is financially incentivized.
- Databroker files often have a lot of errors.
Resolution
There are many privacy related conflicts in the collection, storage, analysis, and use of information in computing systems and networks.