On the evening of August 18 U.S. time, customer and credit card information stolen from the infidelity dating website “Ashley Madison” [1], reportedly covering 37 million people and including nude photos and sexual fantasies, was released. The data amounts to approximately 10 gigabytes. It was released on the “dark web,” where ordinary search engines cannot find it [2].
Credit cards can simply be canceled, but in today’s world, the list labeled “people seeking affairs” itself has a greater privacy impact. It is also likely to have considerable economic value, since it can be used for blackmail. People in the criminal underworld have surely already begun working behind the scenes.
The best way to eliminate this kind of harm is for people to become “adults” and say, “An affair? So what?” or “Nobody is interested in that data.” I once described this at what I think was the closing panel of JICS2013 or a similar event by saying, “What we need now is adult privacy.”
More and more data will leak from now on. That is probably inevitable. Why does it create a privacy impact? Because people use the data in ways that cause a privacy impact. Even if the data is lying around, there will be no privacy impact if everyone acts as though they did not see it.
The current situation, in which “data leakage equals actual privacy impact,” exists because everyone uses information that they should simply leave alone. Like little children. Yes, the current state of affairs is one of “childish privacy.” The media that chase stories about people’s romantic relationships are the same. They are like elementary school children teasing a couple.
In the IoT era, it will probably become impossible to exercise complete control over private data or keep it confidential. On January 1999, Scott McNealy, then president of Sun Microsystems, used the phrase “zero privacy”: “You have zero privacy. Get over it.” [3] He was roundly criticized for those words, but perhaps now we can all appreciate their significance. Put in contemporary terms:
No one can keep everything secret anymore. Grow up.
“When you encounter information that someone else would surely want to keep secret, act as if you did not see it and leave them alone.”[4] That is what it means to be “privacy respecting”—in other words, “adult privacy.”
I hope that people will become “adults” as soon as possible.
Otherwise, the IoT era will become a complete mess!
[1] Ashley Madison: https://www.ashleymadison.com/
[2] There has been extensive coverage, including Gizmodo: “America Wept: Customer Information from Infidelity Website Really Is Exposed Online”, and CNET: “Ashley Madison Membership Data May Finally Have Been Released Online—Hackers Issue Statement.”
[3] Scott McNealy: “You have zero privacy. Get over it.” (1999/1) from Wired:”Sun on Privacy: ‘Get Over It'” (1999/1/26)
[4] “The right to privacy is the right to be let alone.” This is the famous phrase defining the right to privacy in Warren & Brandeis’s paper [5]. It is a profoundly meaningful expression.
[5] Warren, S.D., Brandeis, L.D.:“The Right to Privacy” (1890), Harvard Law Review. Vol. IV December 15, 1890 No. 5
Related posts
If You Care About Privacy, You Should Consider the Impact of the Act Rather Than the Type of Data
I have talked about this in various places, so I imagine many of you may be thinking, “I’ve heard this before...” Currently, a Study Group on…
Corporate Big Data Is Leaking Everywhere
Apparently, many companies' “big data” is leaking everywhere. According to BinaryEdge[1], a security company in Zurich, Switzerland, the results of its study[2] show that vast amounts…
Is It Dangerous When an “Identifier Number” Leaks?
We are entering a summer at the height of the My Number compliance bubble. How is everyone doing? As it happens, pension numbers have leaked on…
You must be logged in to post a comment.