The Privacy Richter Scale 75
Hugh Pickens writes "Jay Cline writes that not all privacy issues are created equal and proposes a privacy Richter scale to rank the bad things that could happen to our privacy. A privacy Richter 1 or 2 event is a temporary bad turn for you or a handful of people, but nothing systemic, posing no lasting harm to individuals or society as a whole. Examples include receiving someone else's mail, having someone expose something embarrassing about you to co-workers or friends, or losing your wallet or purse. Privacy events measuring 4 to 7 on the scale are risks that can cause real and lasting damage to a lot of people and include stolen laptops containing thousands of Social Security numbers and credit-card numbers that would allow identity thieves to make fraudulent transactions that could impact credit scores for years. Finally events topping 8 are points of no return for large numbers of people and society as a whole. DARPA's Total Information Awareness program, proposed in 2002 and defunded by Congress in 2003, would have topped the scale. 'The massive collection of data about U.S. citizens could have created a perpetual bureaucracy that put at risk our right of due process and protection against unlawful search and seizure.' So where does Google's plan to consolidate its 60 privacy policies into a single approach rank? 'The current change ranks at a 3,' writes Cline. 'Larry Page's company will weather this change. I don't see irreparable or lasting harm or loss of liberty. If you don't like Google, use Bing. Don't watch weird things on YouTube. You shouldn't be sending confidential things through Gmail in the first place.'"
Re:If you like privacy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Knowing everything about everyone is certainly the direction we are taking the medium term ; but the society is not ready to cope with that, yet.
idea fail (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow! Hijacking a well known metric for a completely unrelated application just to draw a weak metaphor between the original phenomena being measured and this other unrelated event. Who could have ever thought up something so clever? Maybe next he'll invent a "jump to conclusions mat"! After that maybe he'll propose "dollars" as a new term meaning "lines of code" so that when he's introducing himself to unsuspecting women on the bus he can talk about how much "money" he has made.
FAIL
Plate tectonics are like cars ... (Score:3, Insightful)
... they make for bad analogies.
Well, more seriously, I think there really is a problem with a widely accepted premise that the fragility of the systems that our privacy depends on is deity-given, and that thus we have to somehow cope with "privacy incidents", much like we have to deal with earth quakes instead of getting rid of plate tectonics.
The problem is not so much that from time to time some database containing SSNs is publicly compromised, but that there are SSNs (with all those different functions they serve) in the first place. The object of interest should be the complete lack of any effective protection, which essentially means that large bodies of data are easily available at any time to anyone willing to commit some crimes, while those supposed "incidents" are just the few occasions where it has been publicised, often because some (more-or-less) white-hat did some demonstration.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If you like privacy... (Score:4, Insightful)
Duke LaCrosse players (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember a few years ago when those Duke LaCrosse players were being prosected for rape?
On 60 Minutes, that Lelie Stahl said something to the effect of , 'why are you parents fighting so hard? Make a deal.'
The parents responded, 'because in this day and age of Google and the internet, their names will be forever tied to this People will dearch their names and this will come up. They will never get a job or they will be tarnished for the rest of their lives - unless we get every single charge dismissed.'
Stahl, 'Oooh, I didn't think of that.'
And as for potetic justice, the prodecutor, Nifong, has been dibarred [cnn.com]
I just wish every prosecutor who tried to "make an example" to boost his political career would be disbarred.
Re:If you like privacy... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also a way political correctness may be enforced in future. Never say anything offensive or contriversial to or about anyone anywhere under your real name or anything that can be linked to your real name... ten years down the line a potential employer might find it while googling you, judge you a potential liability or source of workplace discord and throw your application in the bin.
Hmm gets worse than that.... in 10 years time whats "politically correct" may have shifted and all those 'Gingers have no soul' posts may come back to roost.
Risk importance is relative - not absolute (Score:5, Insightful)
Different privacy "issues" affect people in different ways. Consequently there is no sensible way to assign a numerical score to a particular event (such as having your bank account number leaked) in absolute terms.
For example, if someone reveals an unwelcome fact about you on FB, the impact of that "outing" will depend of whether it affects your employability, whether you are interested in being employable (never forget: not everyone is a 20-something american. Some people are retired and don't care that pictures of them being arrested could fall into the hands of an HR person), whether a potential partner may see it - or it may even depend on the values and morals of the viewer. There are no absolutes.
Even having your credit card number taken is not necessarily a big deal, depending where you live. A lot of countries take a view that bank fraud is absorbed by the bank, not by an individual who blamelessly had their account targeted.
So, assigning numbers to event without taking into account the context, the situation of the people involved or the place where they live is largely meaningless. And once you do start to account for all these extra circumstances, any numerical evaluation becomes so specific that you can't generalise a level of threat or seriousness to a particular sort of privacy loss.