privacy <> digital rights management

RL 'Bob' Morgan rlmorgan at washington.edu
Wed Jun 26 12:28:15 PDT 2002


On Wed, 26 Jun 2002, Donald Eastlake 3rd wrote:

> "Privacy", according to the usual definitions, involve controlling the
> spread of information by persons autorized to have it. Contrast with
> secrecy which primarily has to do with stopping the spread of
> information through the actions of those not authorized to have it.
>
> > We have thousands of years of experience with military crypto, where
> > the parties at both ends of the conversation are highly motivated to
> > restrict the flow of private information.  The current state of this
> > technology is very robust.
>
> That's secrecy technology, not privacy technology.

I have seen "private" and "secret" defined in exactly the opposite fashion
as regards keys:  a "private" key is private because you never ever share
it with anyone, whereas a "secret" (symmetric) key is a secret because
you've told someone else and you expect them to not share it (in the sense
of "can you keep a secret?").

Clearly there's not a common understanding of these simple words.  Seems
to me that Dan's mini-rant was referring to "privacy" in the sense you
define it above (controlling spread of info already held by others).

 - RL "Bob"





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