Privacy Awareness Training

Awareness of the implications of information loss, data breach and privacy in general is well known, though interestingly rarely acted upon in general practice. Consider the situation I've just witnessed: someone talking loudly in a Skype conversation about some very personal details of his life, plus the odd snipped of financial information and a few names, in a coffee shop - and a relatively crowded coffee shop at that.

We actually spend a disproportionate amount of time worrying about technical solutions to privacy and yet while we are told every day about the dangers of using our technological goodies: phones, laptops, tablets etc, we seem almost oblivious about the data leakage we commit even without technology. Or maybe in the case of a video call in a crowded coffee shop, with the help of technology.

We probably panic more about sharing pictures on Facebook than exposing all our personal details in public in the manner above.

I'm also reminded of any case that happened in the UK. A man - a parent of a child at the school - was prevented taking his DSLR camera to a school sports day on grounds that he might accidentally take pictures of other children with the camera. As we all know, a big expensive camera takes good pictures. Ironically every other parent took a mobile phone - most with just as good picture resolution as the DSLR and most likely all capable of upload to various social media sites along with the all precious meta-data: location, time stamps etc. Just to add irony here he probably had a telephoto lens so that he could take a picture of just his child...you might like to compare the capabilities of a telephoto lens with that of a camera phone. Further irony comes from the fact that how many picture were uploaded with the childrens' details to social media during and after the event without the permission of all present.

Let's us not forget the fact that an internet connected (or should I say radio network connected) mobile device is already exposing much more information than a non-network connected DSLR camera every will or can. I note in Canon's latest models this however is changing...

Buy hey, let's not let common sense and knowledge get in the way of blind panic and misunderstandings.

Let's for a moment concentrate on opposite end of the privacy spectrum, that of the software engineer or programmer trying to construct a system that processes data. For the most part these engineers receive very little in the way of specific training on algorithms, techniques etc for privacy and information processing in general.

When did you last educate your programmers and engineers on the latest data processing or security techniques?

So this brings me to the state of privacy awareness training. Most companies now mandate this for their employees and mandated training normally has a very high view rate. What is less understood is the amount of understanding gained or relevance from this training. In fact privacy awareness training is rapidly becomming the new sexual harrasment training: watch this 1 hour video and reverse 100s of years of cultural indoctrination and be reborn into a new egalitarian society...wow!

And this is one of the problems of privacy awareness training, that a short, generic introduction to the dangers of information loss and privacy magically solves everything. I am sure that many of the companies that have suffered data breaches of late have such training in place. Even the NSA surely has such training, though the outcome after this education is now well known.

One could enter into a huge sociological and cultural discussion about this, but one thing has always struck me about privacy awareness training:

It caters for the lowest common denominator

Awareness training invariably tells me of the dangers of information breaches, maybe some interesting anecdotes about Target, AOL, NSA etc, the dangers of the internet etc.

It never tells me about programming techniques, system design techniques, practical methods of protecting my email, social media use, the differences between DSLRs and mobile phones etc.

In a nutshell, privacy awareness training is rarely, if ever, relevant to the audience. By making privacy awareness training so generic it actually never properly educates the audience about privacy and information security.

Constructing training that properly addresses each of its target audiences is hard and takes time - that is not to be denied - but we can not continue with generic, information content-less material that while is tells about privacy, it does not educate.

Anyway, the man opposite me is continuing with a call to his therapist/lover...he's been through rough time recently it seems, and it is good to talk...about your religious beliefs, former marriage, your views on men/women/relationships, your friends, your financial situation etc...