Random Privacy

[Greg Broiles]

At 02:16 AM 9/21/2002 -0700, Blanc wrote:
>But researchers at IBM think they have the solution. They have developed an
>ingenious method to protect our privacy, while still giving companies the
>information they crave.

That doesn't sound like a solution to me - they haven't provided anything 
to motivate
people to answer honestly, nor do they address the basic problem, which is 
relying on
the good will and good behavior of the marketers - if a website visitor is 
unwilling
to trust a privacy policy which says "We'll never use this data to annoy or 
harm you",
they're likely to be unimpressed with a privacy policy which says "We'll 
use fancy
math tricks to hide the information you give us from ourselves."

That's not going to change unless they move the randomizing behavior off of 
the marketer's machine and
onto the visitor's machine, allowing the visitor to observe and verify the 
correct
operation of the privacy technology .. which is about as likely as a real 
audit of security-sensitive source code, where that likelihood is tiny now 
and shrinking rapidly the closer we get to the TCPA/Palladium nirvana.

So, no, fancy tricks won't solve the basic problem, which is that once you 
give information to other people, you've got no control over what they do 
with it.

--
Greg Broiles -- gbroiles at parrhesia.com -- PGP 0x26E4488c or 0x94245961