Media

Maleís hand writing in the document by Damon Duncan licensed Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.

As a ENISA Awareness Raising (AR) Community expert, I couldn’t leave this poor citizen in such a misconception.

This is my response to this reader (in Catalan) which was published just today, in the second issue of Ara.

Internet was born without a built-in identity layer. Despite this and the sense of anonymity that users perceive as a result of it, users are not anonymous at all in the Internet. Identity information is leaked in every connection and service we use. Our identity is traceable from our IP or by analyzing the data we supply to Internet sites or even by analysing our surfing pattern. As users, we must assume that data uploaded to the Internet might become public at anytime and that, once published, there’s no way to unpublish it.

However, from a law enforcement point of view, Internet is a rough place. Despite all this identity information leaks, it is difficult to identify people responsible of a crime on the Internet. If we want to be able to prosecute criminals using current available identity information, we must accept that we may make mistakes identifying them. Nobody wants that, so officials ask for an identity layer in the Internet.

This debate, which not only belongs to the Internet world, has often been characterized as a privacy versus security trade-off. Not everyone agrees: security expert Bruce Schneier, for instance, thinks that considering it as a trade-off is a fallacy. Schneier’s point is that, for each threat, there are options in the countermeasures to be taken to deal with it, and that some of them will not be privacy-invasive.

In my opinion it isn’t always possible to find solutions to security problems that preserve privacy. At the same time, I think it’s true that, from all the possible options, privacy-invasive solutions are often taken. Perhaps this is because measures are taken without a good analysis, or perhaps because the security problem, as explained, is only an excuse to implement a pre-taken measure. The truth is that we can improve that.

Additionally to the problem of privacy loss to security officials, nowadays we face a massive privacy loss problem due to data we or our friends upload to multiple services. All this information can be and is used in several ways, sometimes in our benefit, but often irrespectfully and, even more, illegally. Some have tried to downplay its importance using the “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” argument, even people as intellectually capable as Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. Daniel Solove, George Washington University Law School professor, has a good refutation on this fallacy that is a must-read: an essay called “‘I’ve nothing to hide’ and other misunderstandings of privacy”. We must not forget that privacy is a right recognized by The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 12.

Article 12

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

So, from my point of view, we need to find the proper balance between preserving privacy and linking user actions to identity information. We may need to keep some data to do this, but we should put some barriers so that this data is not misused, perhaps by not making it available to a single entity or by raising the cost/time of using it. We must make use of privacy-enhancing technologies (PET), be creative and, most importantly, make careful decisions on best countermeasures to handle each security problem.

To close this post, this is a talk by Lawrence Lessig given at Accenture about the need for an identity layer in the Internet. Take your time because it’s a long video. Note this video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

References

CATCert (2010) CATCert – Agència Catalana de Certificació [online], http://catcert.cat
CATCert (2010) The 7th Electronic Signature Congress
Graells, J. (2010) “Privacitat 2.0″, Graellsbloc, 28 October
Schneier, B (2008) Security vs. Privacy
Solove, D. (2007) “‘I’ve nothing to hide’ and other misunderstandings of privacy”, San Diego Law Review, Vol. 44, p. 745, 2007
Tate, R. (2009) Google CEO: Secrets Are for Filthy People, Gawker
United Nations General Assembly (1948), The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

There’s a chance that I know you personally, and perhaps I tend to have you in my Facebook but not in my LinkedIn. In this case you may prefer to go indoors.