ePrivacy Directive

It seems that the proposal for the new ePrivacy Directive has been leaked - not quite sure I'd put it in the same league as the Panama Papers but good to see an early draft of the most important piece of potential privacy legislation since the GDPR

Here's the link to the PDF: http://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/POLITICO-e-privacy-directive-review-draft-december.pdf

It is highly unlikely that this will be retracted or hidden...something called the Streisand Effect.

As this concerns networks and OTT service providers this is potentially far more interesting that the GDPR in its scope. And, before someone goes off on a Daily Mail style anti-EU rant ( "EU bureaucrat demand that companies protect user data is evil" kind of thing ), this brings greater clarity and consistency to companies and EU citizens regarding how companies can use, profit from, market, sell etc, their data - good stuff!

Google Blogger and EU Cookie Laws

This is very kind of Google...providing you with an automatically generated privacy notice to European customers as detailed on the Blogger settings page:

This to me highlights a few problems with privacy laws and compliance:

• Firstly, you have to understand EU privacy laws
• You have to understand how to write such a notice
• You have to understand what systems such as Google Analytics etc actually collect and process.
• You might have to provide an opt-out mechanism such as Google's Analytics Opt-Out.

For 99.999% of bloggers (+/- a few %age points), I strongly doubt that any of this is understood or even known about at all.

So while Google might come in for some criticism for its dominance in the information gathering domain, they at least try to make things easier for their customers.

Then there's the EU Cookie Consent Kit which guides you through at least one part of the consent notice maze.

As an exercise, write a simple website...now work out what privacy notice you should display. Just to make it interesting, you are not allowed to have any contact with a privacy lawyer nor anyone who has a detailed knowledge about such things.

This quote by Einstein (often misattributed to Feynmann) sums up privacy laws and the average person writing a blog:

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother

Our privacy laws have become so complicated and often so misaligned with technology that they can not be easily understood by the average Internet user.

Warning: Coffee Might Kill You

So, I found out recently that coffee might kill you. Seriously, it is a dangerous substance - almost as dangerous as a 110ml bottle of water is to your safety on an aircraft (but a 1 litre bottle of something alcoholic bought at duty free isn't) - and here's the proof (seen in a Starbucks in San Jose, CA):

Proposition 65 Warning Notice: "Coffee Might Kill You"

I'm not actually sure whether that has stopped anyone from buying coffee (or tea for that matter), ever. I suppose you could switch to that decaf muck, but you're probably going to die of something equally horrible then too.

I guess some lawyers and/or politicians need to cover their asses...

How not to collect data

Would you give your personal details to someone without knowing what they're going to be used for? How about if I said, "give me your name, email address and post code" and I'll make you a member of our exclusive most-favoured customer club? But, I'm not going to tell you what the terms and conditions are, how I'll use the data or even who I am except by vague implication in the latter case?

How about if I wrote the above on a piece of paper and left it on an official looking stand in a shop...yes?

Seen in a shop in Finland:

The text says:

Join now as a favoured customer and you'll hear always as the first about our fantastic offers and wonderful happenings. 

If you want to join as our favoured customer just fill this form with the needed information and hand it to the staff and we will take care of the rest. 

Name:_____________________________________________________
Email:_____________________________________________________
Postcode:___________________________________________________

I tried asking the store staff but they say it is a different company's problem and they have no idea of how the forms will be used. So far I've had no luck in contacting the company to which the forms probably belong...

Automating Privacy Compliance

I was at the 2015 meeting of the UK Ontology Network in Leeds earlier this month where, amongst many, there was a presentation about a tool called Sparqlycode - which if you get the chance you must check out!

Anyway, Paul Worral of Interition Ltd wrote a very nice summary of my work:

Ian Oliver [Nokia Networks, Espoo, Finland] presented Ontologies for Privacy.  The whole idea behind Sparqlycode is to provide an information tier for software that enables it to be linked to knowledge about the business.  Ian's work is a perfect example of this. He demonstrates how high-level policies on Personally Identifiable Information should and can be directly related to the code responsible for adhering to them. Ian has authored a book on the subject, Privacy Engineering. I bought it and hope to have some examples of how it can be applied to Sparqlycode soon.

I look forward to seeing how this works out, but it certainly is in the direction of where I hoped. It'll be very interesting to see how this particular approach matches with a more data-flow based modelling approach.

At UKON2015 there was also an extremely interesting presentation about a tool called TawnyOWL for programmatically generating ontologies. Given that Clojure is my current language of choice this seems a perfect fit for the privacy ontologies themselves.

On Finding Reasonable Measures To Bridge the Gap Between Privacy Engineers and Lawyers

This article originally appeared on the Privacy Association website on 29th July 2014.

On Finding Reasonable Measures To Bridge the Gap Between Privacy Engineers and Lawyers

Getting privacy lawyers and software engineers to work together to implement privacy is a perennial problem. Peter Swire, CIPP/US, and Annie Anton's article "Engineers and Lawyers in Privacy Protection: Can We All Just Get Along?" has explored this as has The Privacy Engineer's Manifesto, of which their article is part.

But here's the problem: We cannot keep addressing privacy from a top-down, legally driven perspective. No amount of additional processes and compliance checks is going to change the fact that software itself is so complex. Software engineering is often assumed to be the final stage and by some a mere consequence of many requirements from a large number of often conflicting sources.

Often privacy issues are “solved” by hashing an identifier, encrypting a communications link or anonymizing a data set, for some definition of anonymization. Many of these are piecemeal, ineffective, Band-Aid type solutions—the proverbial rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic. Privacy Theater at its worst … or best.

So how do we address this?

First, maybe we should realize that we don't really understand each other’s disciplines. Very few lawyers are trained software engineers and vice-versa; therefore, constructing a lingua franca between these groups is part of that first step.

Often, understanding ideas that are simple in one domain do not translate to the other. For example, the use of the term “reasonable” means nothing in the software engineering domain. Plus, the simple act of “encryption” to a software engineer hides an enormous complexity of network protocols, key management, performance, encryption libraries and so on. Similarly, the now-ubiquitous use of “app” by lawyers to mean something that runs on your phone means a lot more to the software engineer.

What does “app” really mean to software engineers?

That little piece of code that downloads your news feed each morning and presents it in a friendly way—allowing you the scroll through using your touch screen device and maybe now and again presenting an advert because you didn't want to buy the paid version—is, in fact, not a tiny bit of code at all.

Effectively, what runs on your device is a multi-layered, complex interaction of hundreds of components, each sharing the device's memory, long-term storage, network components, display, keyboard, microphone, camera, speaker, GPS and so on. Each of those individual components interacts with layers underneath the interface, passing messages between components, scheduling when pieces of code must run and which piece of code gets the notification that you've just touched the screen as well as how and where data is stored.

When the app needs to get the next news item “from the web,” we have a huge interaction of network protocols that marshal the contents of the news feed, check its consistency, perform error-correction, marshal the individual segments of message from the network, manage addressing messages and internal format. There are protocols underneath this that decide on the routing between networks and those that control the electrical pulses over wires or antennae. This itself is repeated many, many times as messages are passed between routing points all over the Internet and includes cell towers, home wireless routers, undersea cables and satellite connections. Even the use of privacy-preserving technologies—encryption, for example—can be rendered virtually meaningless because underneath lies a veritable treasure trove of metadata. And that is just the networking component!

Let's for the moment look at the application's development itself, probably coded in some language such as Java, which itself is a clever beast that theoretically runs anywhere because it runs on top of a virtual machine and can be ported to almost any computing platform. The language contains many features to make a programmer's life easier by abstracting away complex details of the underlying mechanisms of how computers work. These are brought together through a vast library of publicly available libraries for a plethora of tasks—from generating random numbers to big data analytics—in only a 'few' lines of well-chosen code.

Even without diving deep into the code and components of which it’s made, similar complexity awaits in understanding where our content flows. Maybe your smartphone’s news app gets data from a news server and gives you the opportunity to share it through your favorite social network. Where does your data flow after these points? To advertisers, marketers, system administrators and so on? Through what components? And what kinds of processing? How about cross-referencing? Where is that data logged and who has access?

Constructing a full map or data flow of a typical software system—even a simple mobile app—becomes a spider web of interacting information flows, further complicated by layering over the logical and physical architectures, the geographical distribution and concepts such as controller and processor. Not to mention the actual content of the data, its provenance, the details of its collection, the risks, the links with policies and so on. And yet we still have not considered the security, performance and other functional and nonfunctional aspects!

Software engineers have enough of a problem managing this complexity without having to learn and comprehend legal language, too. Indeed, privacy won't get a foothold in software engineering until a path from “reasonable” can be traced through the myriad requirements to those millions of lines of code that actually implement “reasonable.”

Engineers love a challenge, but often when solutions are laid out before them in terms of policy and vague concepts—concepts which to us might be perfectly reasonable (there's that word again!)—then those engineers are just going to ignore or, worse, mis-implement those requirements. Not out of any malicious intent but because those requirements are almost meaningless in their domain. Even concepts such as data minimization can lose much if not all of their meaning as we move through the layers of code and interaction.

Life as a software engineer is hard: juggling a complex framework of requirements, ideas, systems, components and so on without interpreting what a privacy policy actually means across and inside the Internet-wide environment in which we work.

Software isn't a black box protected by a privacy policy and a suite of magic privacy-enhancing technologies but a veritable Pandora's Box of who-knows-what of “things.”

As privacy professionals, we should open that box often to fully comprehend what is really going on when we say “reasonable.” As software engineers, we'll more than make you welcome in our world, and we'd probably relish the chance to explore yours. But until we both get visibility in our respective domains and make the effort to understand each other's languages and how these relate to each other, this isn't going to happen—at least not in any “reasonable” way
.

Foundations of Privacy - Another Idea

This got triggered by a post on LinkedIn about what a degree in privacy might contain. I've certainly thought about this before, at least in terms of software engineering, and even have a whole course that could be taken over a semester ready to go.

Aside: CMU has the "World's First Privacy Engineering Course": a Master of Science in Information Technology—Privacy Engineering (MSIT-PE) degree. So, close, but a major university here in Finland turned down the chance to create something similar a few years back...

That aside, I've been wondering about how to present they various levels of things we need to consider to properly define privacy and put it on strong foundations. Though in the guise of information theory we already have this, though admittedly Shannon's seminal work from the 1930's is maybe a little too deep. On the other hand understanding concepts such as channels, entropy are fundamental building blocks, so maybe they should be there along with privacy law - now that would make some course!

Even just sketching out areas to present and what might be contained therein...how about this, even if a linear map from morality to mathematics is too constraining?

There are missing bits - we still have a  semantic gap between the "legal world" and the "engineering world"; parts that I'm hoping that things such as the many conferences, academic works and books such as the excellent Privacy Engineer's Manifesto and Privacy Engineering will play a role in defining. Maybe the semantic gap goes away once we start looking at this...is there even a semantic gap? 

However, imagine for a moment starting anywhere in this stack and working up and down and keeping everything linked together in the context of privacy and information security. Imagine seeing the link between EU privacy laws and type theory, or between the construction of policies and entropy, the algebra of HIPAA, a side course in homotopy type theory and privacy...maybe with that last one I'm getting carried away, but, this is exactly what we need to have in place.

Each layer provides the semantics to the layer above - what do our morals and ethics means in terms of formalised laws, what do laws mean in terms of policies, what do policies mean in terms of software engineering structures, and down to the core mathematics and algebras of information.

Privacy and privacy engineering in particular almost has everything: law, algebra, morals, ethics, semantics, policy, software, entropy, information, data, BigData, Semantic Web etc etc etc. Furthermore, we have links to areas such as security, cryptography, economic theory etc!

Aren't these the very things any practitioner of privacy (engineering) should know, or at least have knowledge of? Imagine if lawyers understood information theory and semantics, and, software engineers understood law? 

OK, so there might be various ways of putting this stack together, competing theories of privacy etc, but that would be the real beauty here - a complete theory of privacy from the core mathematics through physics, computation, type theory, software engineering, policies, law and even ethics and morals.

But again, no more naivety, no more terminological or ontological confusions, policies and laws being traceable right down to the computation structures and code. Quite a tall order, but such a course bringing all these together really would be wonderful...

And wouldn't that be something!

Semiotic Analysis of a Privacy Policy

Pretty much every service has a privacy policy attached to it; these policies state the data collection, usage, purpose and expectations that the customer has to agree with before using that said service. But at another level they also attempt to signify (that's going to be a key word) that the consumer can trust the company providing the service at some level. Ok, so there's been huge amounts of press about certain social media and search service provides "abusing" this trust and so on, but we still use the services provided by those companies.

So this gets me thinking, when a privacy policy is written, could we analyse that text to understand better the motives and expectations from both the customer and the service provider perspective? Effectively can we make a semiotic analysis of a privacy policy.

What would we gain by this? It is imperative that any texts of this nature portray the right image to the consumer, thus this can be used in the drafting of such a text to ensure that this this right image is correctly portrayed. For example, the oft seen statement:

"Your privacy is important to us"

is a sign in the semiotic sense, and in this case probably an 'icon' in its near universal usage. Signs are a relationship between the 'object' and 'interpretant', respectively the subject matter at hand and the clarified meaning respectively.

Pierce's Semiotic Trangle

The object may be that we (the writer of the statement) are trying to state a matter of fact about how trust worthy we are, or at least we want to emphasise that we can be trusted.

The interpretant of this, if we are the customer, can of course vary from total trust to utter cynicism. I guess of late the latter interpretation tends to be true. Understanding the variation in interpretants is a clear method for understanding what is being conveyed by the policy itself and whether the right impression is being given to the consumer.

At a very granular level the whole policy itself is a sign and the very existance of that policy and its structure, is it long and full of legalese or short and simple? Then there's the content (as described above) which may or may not depend upon the size of the policy....as in the World's Worst Privacy Policy.

References:

Andy Greenberg (2012) The World's Worst Privacy Policy. Forbes 25 Jan 2012.

Aside:

Found this paper while researching for this: Philippe Codognet's THE SEMIOTICS OF THE WEB, it starts with a quote:

I am not sure that the web weaved by Persephone in this Orphic tale, cited in exergue of Michel Serres’ La communication , is what we are currently used to call the World Wide Web. Our computer web on the internet is nevertheless akin Persephone’s in its aims : representing and covering the entire universe. Our learned ignorance is conceiving an infinite virtual world whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere ...

Must admit, I find that very, very nice. Best I've got is getting quotes about existential crises and cosmological structures in a paper about the Semantic Web with Ora Lassila.

On The Naivety of Privacy

Recent events regarding privacy and the internet have left me wondering if we are being somewhat naïve. We are starting to see a slew of new laws, strategies and technologies for protecting our privacy in what is effectively a public space. The end-user however is not, as far as I can tell, really getting the benefit of this - indeed if anyone is it is the emerging privacy-industrial complex [1] as some have written.

It is utterly naïve to believe that laws, strategies, intentions, grand speeches, certifications, automatic filtering, classification iconography and so on make for better end-user privacy. The more we do this the more confused we become, and simultaneously we lose sight of what we're really trying to achieve. Spare a thought for the poor end-users.

There is a great deal that is misunderstood or not known by privacy advocates about how the internet, computers and information systems work - I fear in a lot of cases either some don't want to understand because it takes them outside of their comfort zone, or the semantic gap between the engineers and the legal/advocacy side is too great and that bridging this gap is extraordinarily difficult for both parties.

I worry about our lack of formality and discipline, possibly in equal quantities. We – the privacy community – lack these aspects to really understand and accept the fundamentals of our area and how to apply this to the information systems we are trying to protect. In some cases we are actively fighting against the need to scientifically ground our chosen area.

We must take a moment to think and understand what problem we are really trying to solve. The more philosophical works by Solove and Nissenbaum address the overall concept of privacy. I'm not sure that the implications of these are really understood. Part of the problem is that general theories of information [2] are very abstract and obtuse when compared with the legal views of the above authors, and we've done very little to tie these areas together to produce the necessary scientific formalisation of privacy we need.

As an example, the Privacy by Design (PbD) manifesto is being waived by many to be the commandments of privacy and following these magically solves everything. This only leads to “technical debt” and greater problems in the future. Often we find the engineers, R&D teams and the scientists excluded from, and outside of, this discussion.

I think we're missing the point what privacy really is and certainly we have little idea at this time how to effectively build information systems with inherent privacy [3] as a property of those systems. I have one initial conclusion:

WE HAVE NO UNDERLYING THEORY OF PRIVACY

We have no common definitions, common language, common semantics nor mappings between our individual worlds: legal, advocacy and engineering. Worse, in each of these worlds terminology and semantics are not always so well internally defined.

When an [software] engineer says “data collection”, "log" or "architecture", these do not mean the same to a lawyer or a consumer advocate. Indeed I don't think these terms semantically map even remotely cleanly – if at all - between these groups.

A set of PowerPoint slides with a strategy, a vision, a manifesto, good intentions, project plan or a classifications scheme mean very little and without some form of semantics are wasted, token efforts that only add to the complexity and confusion of a rapidly changing field.

We desperately need to address the problem that we must create a way of communicating amongst ourselves through which all of the internal factions within the privacy community can effectively understand each other's point of view. Only then might we even have a chance of realistically and effectively addressing the moving target of privacy issues facing end- users and businesses that rely so much on the interchange and analysis of information.

The problem with formally (or rigorously) defining anything is that it has the nasty tendency to expose holes and weaknesses in our thinking. Said holes and weaknesses are not entirely appreciated, especially when it challenges an established school of thought or a political or dogmatic balance [4].

The privacy community is constantly developing new laws and legal arguments, new sets of guidelines, manifestos and doom scenarios while the engineers are trying to address these often inconsistent and complex ideas through technical means. From the engineering perspective not only we are internally exposing flaws in database design, information system architecture and user experience but also the mismatch between engineering, legal, the world of the consumer advocate and ultimately a company's information strategy.

An information strategy needs to address everything from how the engineers develop software to how you want your company to be perceived by the consumer. How many information strategies actually address the role that information plays in a modern, global consumer ecosystem where the central concept is the collection and processing of user information? Of those, how many address the engineering and scientific levels of information?

We must take a serious retrenchment [5] step and look back at what we have created. Then we need ruthlessly carve away anything that does not either solve the communication issue within the privacy community or does not immediately serve the end-user. Reemphasizing the latter point, this explicitly means the end-user values, not what we as a privacy community might perceive to be valued by the end-user.

We must fully appreciate the close link between privacy and information, and that privacy is one of the most crosscutting of disciplines. Privacy is going to expose every single flaw in the way we collect, manage, process and use information from the user experience, as well as the application and services eco-system, and even the manner in which we conduct our system and software engineering processes and information governance. The need to get privacy right is critical not just for the existence of privacy as a technical discipline in its own right (alongside security, architecture, etc) but also for the consumer and the business.

The emphasis must be placed on the deep technical knowledge of experts in information systems – these must be the drivers and unifiers between the engineers, the lawyers, the advocates and ultimately the users. Without this deep, holistic, scientific and mathematical foundation we will not be able to sufficiently nor consistency address or govern any issues that arise in the construction of our information systems at any level of abstraction.

If the work we do in privacy does not have a scientific, consistent and formal underpinning [6] that brings together the engineers, lawyers and advocates then privacy is waste of time at best and deeply destructive to the information systems at worst.

Without this we are a disjointed community caring for ourselves and not the business or consumer and privacy becomes just a bureaucratic exercise to fulfill the notions of performing a process and metrics rendered as meaningful as random numbers.

* * *

PostScript:

Via Twitter I came across a talk given by Jean Bezivin entitled "Should we Resurrect Software Engineering?" presented at the Choose Forum in December 2012. Many of the things he presented are analogous to what is happening in privacy. He makes the point a number of times that we have never addressed the missing underlying theory of software engineering and how to really unify the various communities, fields and techniques in this area. Two points I particularly liked was that we concentrated on the solution (MDE) but never thought about the problem; the other point is the use Albert Camus' quote

<< Mal nommer les choses, c'est ajouterau malheur du monde >>

[To misname things is to add misery to the world]

A subtle hint to getting the fundamentals right: terminology and semantics!


Notes

[1] #pii2012: The Emergent Privacy-Industrial Complex

[2] Jerry Seligmann, Jon Barwise (1997) Information Flow. Cambridge University Press.

[3] I like the idea of privacy being an inherent construct in system design in much the same way that inherent safety emerged from chemical/industrial plant design

[4] A blog article discussing “mathematical catastrophes” – two that come to mind are Russel and Frege and also Russel and Gödel. Both related but the latter’s challenge to the mathematical school of thought was dramatic to say the least.

[5] A formal retrenchment step in that we not just start again but actively record what we’re backtracking on. Poppleton et.al. constructed a theory of retrenchment for software design using formal methods; the same principles apply here.

[6] If you’re still in doubt just remember that whatever decisions are made with respect to privacy, there’s a programmer writing formal, mathematical statements encoding this. Lessig’s Code is Law principle.

Patents...

I fear the outcome of this, whether good or bad this is going to be a hell of mess and ultimately much, much worse for the consumer (unless you happen to be a patent lawyer)...

Apple Made A Deal With The Devil (No, Worse: A Patent Troll)

 Over the last two years, Apple has been engaged in vicious legal battles over smartphone patents, many of which are aimed at squelching (or squeezing money out of) manufacturers of devices running Android. And now, for some reason, it has given valuable patents to a patent troll — which is using them to sue many of the top technology companies in the world.

Privacy

28 September 2010 Last updated at 11:50 GMT

Fresh ACS:Law file-sharing lists expose thousands more

By Daniel Emery Technology reporter, BBC News

The personal details of a further 8,000 people alleged to have shared music or films illegally have appeared online. A list of more than 8,000 Sky broadband subscribers and a second of 400 PlusNet users surfaced following a security breach of legal firm ACS:Law.

How many innocent people's name are on that suspect list? Yours?

We Own Your Soul

The dangers of not reading terms and conditions:

GameStation: "We own your soul"
Author: Joe Martin
Published: 15th April 2010

In a bid to prove that nobody reads the T&Cs of an online sale, GameStation added a new clause of their own...GameStation has today revealed that it legally owns the souls of thousands of customers, thanks to a clause it secretly added to the online terms and conditions for the official GameStation website.


The "Immortal Soul Clause" was added as part of an attempt to highlight how few customers read the terms and conditions of an online sale. GameStation claims that 88 percent of customers did not read the clause, which gives legal ownership of the customer's soul over to the UK-based games retailer.

Interesting not because they wrote such a clause - though I'm not sure of its legality: both Richard Dawkins and the Catholic Church would have something to say about its precise details, but rather the fact that we habitually agree to terms and conditions of software, eg: Windows 7, Windows XP without understanding the ramifications upon our personal privacy and rights.

File sharing and copyright...

Geist: Record industry faces liability over `infringement'

This is interesting (if not just a little ironic)...as the MPAA, RIAA and various other copyright agencies would have you believe, piracy of music and films is "destroying" the music industry - and not the banal, manufactured [sic.] music that is being produced and sold for extremely high prices in the shops.

We're all guilty, even singing "Happy Birthday" makes you guilty of copyright infringement and subject to prosecution in many countries (UK, USA etc). Download an mp3 of the same song 3 times and go to jail, lose internet connection etc etc.

Now the tables have been turned on one of these organisations - the Canadian Recording Industry Association (Canada's RIAA) - who have been accused of infringing copyright in exactly the same way as they've been accusing everyone else. Applying the same "mathematics" they've used for fining people over copyright infringement of individual songs they're being sued for 60,000,000,000 (sixty billion) dollars (presumably Canadian dollars)

Here's a quote from the story:

Chet Baker was a leading jazz musician in the 1950s, playing trumpet and providing vocals. Baker died in 1988, yet he is about to add a new claim to fame as the lead plaintiff in possibly the largest copyright infringement case in Canadian history. His estate, which still owns the copyright in more than 50 of his works, is part of a massive class-action lawsuit that has been underway for the past year.

The infringer has effectively already admitted owing at least $50 million and the full claim could exceed $60 billion. If the dollars don't shock, the target of the lawsuit undoubtedly will: The defendants in the case are Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada, the four primary members of the Canadian Recording Industry Association.

which can be found in full here.

Citation for the above (see the link at the top also):  By Michael Geist Internet Law Columnist at The Star  (Toronto Edition)

Approximately at the time of writing:

60,000,000,000 CAD = 56,900,000,000 USD = 38,400,000,000 EUR = 34,800,000,000 GBP = 2100 metric tonnes of Gold.

An Explanation of Computation Theory for Lawyers

Fantastic article from Groklaw (of SCO vs reality fame) about computation theory and how it applies to (US) patent law.