privacy <> digital rights management

[Adam Shostack]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2002 at 09:51:58AM -0400, 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.

It sounds to me like you mean "data protection," not "privacy."  By
data protection, I mean the ability of the state to tell you not to
use information about certain people in certain ways.  See, for
example, the EU Data Protection Directive.

I find its really useful to not use the word privacy in debates about
privacy; it simply means too many things to too many people.

Bob Blakely once defined privacy as "The ability to lie about
yourself and get away with it" which is an interesting definition.
Other good ones include untracability, the inability to trace from a
message to a person; unlinkability, the inability to link two
instances of "theres a person here" to the same person;
and unobservability, which is the ability to not be observed doing
something (think curtains, my current favorite privacy technology.)

| > 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'm not getting into this one. :)

-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume