Lies, damned lies and privacy The Challenge The Historical Answer PETs! ff Results? No or little usage Complex and low usability No natural social interaction pattern! "What does PET-use signal?"" Privacy enhancing technologies signal that the user has something to hide (whether true or not). When, in our regular life do we signal something like this at all? Are there even social interaction patterns where we do this, explicitly? My (tentative) answer: no. Alternative Solution Start with what interaction patterns we can observe when studying how we preserve privacy elsewhere, and see if we can build on them. What then is privacy? Images of privacy The Private Sphere and the Disciplining Gaze The Act Interlude: The Value of Privacy 1. The right on which all rights rest - both pre-condition and check on power. 2. Economic perspective “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” Oscar Wilde How do we preserve privacy in daily life? What games do we play? One answer: we lie. Can we build on lying to design better privacy protection into products? What is a lie? To intentionally tell something that is not so A sin? Destructive? Evil...? "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor." Augustine's taxonomy of lying... Lies in religious teaching. Lies that harm others and help no one. Lies that harm others and help someone. Lies told for the pleasure of lying. Lies told to "please others in smooth discourse." Lies that harm no one and that help someone. Lies that harm no one and that save someone's life. Lies that harm no one and that save someone's "purity." "a statement at variance with the mind" - Aquinas An evolutionary trait? What would lie enhancing technologies look like? Supporting lies Confirm, Ignore and "Confirm" Nietzschean privacy Steganography "Do you lie on online dating sites?" 20 % Yes. Frost-study (SciAm) "What percentages of online daters do you think lie?" 90% Frost-Study (SciAm) From PETs to LETs Power mechanism "The lie is a technique for the restriction of the social distribution of knowledge over time, and is thus ultimately woven into the system of power and control in society." Gilsenan 1976 The idea: to design privacy into the systems. Vranyo vs Lozh "I believe it worth noting that *sometimes* lie catching violates a relationship, betrays trust, steals information that was not, for good reason, given (Ekman 1985) In fact: lie catching can be privacy invasion "Systems of animal communication are not systems for dissemination or discovery of truth" (after Trivers 1985, social evolution) Evolutionary advantages to lying? Popper: language evolved, signs evolve as they can have and be given many meanings. Are we the descendants of the fittest liars? The experiment involved 1,000 robots divided into 10 different groups. Each robot had a sensor, a blue light, and its own 264-bit binary code "genome" that governed how it reacted to different stimuli. The first generation robots were programmed to turn the light on when they found the good resource, helping the other robots in the group find it. The robots got higher marks for finding and sitting on the good resource, and negative points for hanging around the poisoned resource. The 200 highest-scoring genomes were then randomly "mated" and mutated to produce a new generation of programming. Within nine generations, the robots became excellent at finding the positive resource, and communicating with each other to direct other robots to the good resource. However, there was a catch. A limited amount of access to the good resource meant that not every robot could benefit when it was found, and overcrowding could drive away the robot that originally found it. After 500 generations, 60 percent of the robots had evolved to keep their light off when they found the good resource, hogging it all for themselves. Even more telling, a third of the robots evolved to actually look for the liars by developing an aversion to the light; the exact opposite of their original programming! "Consistent deniable lying technologies" Belle & Waldvogel 2008t "Social networking is moving to mobile phones. This not only means continuous access, but also allows to link virtual and physical neighbourhood in novel ways. To make such systems useful, personal data such as lists of friends and interests need to be shared with more and frequently unknown people, posing a risk to your privacy. In this paper, we present our approach to social networking, Consistent Deniable Lying (CDL). Using easy-to-understand mechanisms and tuned to this environment, it enables you to meet new friends with joint interests while limiting exposure of your private data. Not only can it be generalised to include “friends of friends” (transitivity) into interest search, it allows you to plausibly refute any allegations of your claimed interests. Unlike prior work, we focus on the application to similarity finding and include the novel aspects of transitivity and deniability, which are key to success in social networks." " By introducing con- sistent untruths in a user’s specific dataset the user gets the deciding factor to authorise the information other users may see. Further, we defined a method to refine the untruths introduced in a dataset on a per-user basis, thus, giving the user control over the amount of fake information and also taking into account transitive relationships." “Telling lies is the best form of security on social networks. That’s according to Sophos’ Senior Technology Consultant Graham Cluley in an exclusive interview with TechRadar. “One of the things we’ve been saying is to start lying. On Facebook, it asks you for your date of birth – under the terms and conditions you’re not allowed to lie. “I say ‘screw them’ and lie about [your] date of birth. I don’t trust them to look after it, they revealed it once before.” And he says this preventative attitude applies to other areas, too. “With my online bank I lie about my mother’s maiden name. But people feel compelled to tell the truth all the time. Tech Radar Problems! Legal Ethical Social Is it legal to lie online? Will lying destroy the Internet? Is there a right to be able to lie? We trust in technology too much - lying tech would make us vulnerable The PET-model is based on the idea that privacy is a *design feature* BUT privacy is something else... The Game Privacy is not so much a design feature of a system, it is a state of the system. It is not the colour of the board, the pieces or even the way they move. It is a set of positions, much like "check". PETs were very much about the colour of the board and the shape of the pieces. Any questions about that? More work 0) Think about prototypes - lies of omission and commission 1) Lie-tolerant systems and oath technologies 2) Studies of how people lie with technology - Spam filter ate your e-mail - Bad mobile coverage 3) is lying changing in the information society? Privacy features The sphere and the gaze are the perhaps most common components in privacy concepts Dear Friend , Especially for you - this cutting-edge announcement . If you are not interested in our publications and wish to be removed from our lists, simply do NOT respond and ignore this mail ! This mail is being sent in compliance with Senate bill 2116 , Title 2 ; Section 305 ! This is different than anything else you've seen . Why work for somebody else when you can become rich within 58 MONTHS . Have you ever noticed people love convenience plus people will do almost anything to avoid mailing their bills ! Well, now is your chance to capitalize on this ! We will help you increase customer response by 140% & deliver goods right to the customer's doorstep ! You can begin at absolutely no cost to you ! But don't believe us . Mr Jones of Delaware tried us and says "Now I'm rich many more things are possible" ! We are licensed to operate in all states . We BESEECH you - act now . Sign up a friend and you get half off ! Thank-you for your serious consideration of our offer ! Dear Sir or Madam ; Especially for you - this breath-taking intelligence . If you no longer wish to receive our publications simply reply with a Subject: of "REMOVE" and you will immediately be removed from our directory . This mail is being sent in compliance with Senate bill 1816 , Title 3 , Section 301 ! THIS IS NOT A GET RICH SCHEME ! Why work for somebody else when you can become rich within 26 weeks . Have you ever noticed more people than ever are surfing the web & people are much more likely to BUY with a credit card than cash ! Well, now is your chance to capitalize on this . We will help you decrease perceived waiting time by 100% and deliver goods right to the customer's doorstep ! The best thing about our system is that it is absolutely risk free for you . But don't believe us ! Ms Anderson who resides in Illinois tried us and says "I was skeptical but it worked for me" ! We are licensed to operate in all states . You will blame yourself forever if you don't order now ! Sign up a friend and you'll get a discount of 70% . Thanks ! "Kill the keynote speaker now" Thanks for listening!