4 ms·

I wonder how encryption, if it indeed becomes as widely used as many of us hope it does, will affect the ability of future historians to read all these archives

by kijin 10y ago

I wonder how encryption, if it indeed becomes as widely used as many of us hope it does, will affect the ability of future historians to read all these archives. All of my computers and backups are encrypted. If I were to drop dead tomorrow or suffer some kind of memory loss, 99% of the documents and pictures I own will turn into meaningless blobs, assuming the cryptography in the products I use are any good. I have no intention to print out the keys and give them to someone while I'm still young and healthy. Part of the reason is that I believe those files should die with me. There's nothing incriminating, nor anything particularly embarrassing, it's just nobody else's effin' business. That's what privacy means to me. And yet, it is the business of historians and librarians to poke into dead people's private documents and learn from them. In an ideal future society, maybe it will be historians, not spooks, who try to break commonly used encryption methods.

acdha 10y ago
I think this is going to be a big problem, even without the specific hard-failure mode of encryption — people are generating tons and tons of data and most of it goes in the same place and is frequently hard to manage. A generation ago, when someone died their next of kin were probably going to be reasonably comfortable donating the contents of their office to the local university — you could quickly scan to see if there was anything truly bizarre hidden in the closet, most people didn't take that many photographs (especially NSFW ones, what with meddling clerks) and you could quickly look over the ones they did have to make sure there wasn't anything you wanted, etc. Now, though, almost everyone carries around high-quality cameras and generates gigabytes a year of geo-located pictures. Many casual conversations which would have been lost forever are now recorded. Some of it might be easy to exclude (“Scholars will just have to live without the Chief Justice's online dating history”) but it's hard to imagine being able to quickly go through a mixed service like Facebook or a cloud photo backup service without some potentially embarrassing oversights. I'd bet the most likely outcome of this would be scholars having to wait for increasingly long embargo periods to expire to avoid the odds of data-mining or computer vision finding unwanted links to people who are still alive. That's not to say that this didn't happen in the past – a good example was the time that Justice Thurgood Marshall donated his papers to the Library of Congress under terms allowing access after his death, leading to a minor firestorm when a clever Washington Post reporter used them for insights about other people who were still serving on the Supreme Court: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/26/us/chief-justice-assails-library-on-release-of-marshall-papers.html http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/26/us/chief-justice-assails-l...
ridgeguy 10y ago
If your data dies with you, the rest of us lose whatever insight your data might have given us. Suggestion: leave decryption instructions with (attorney, loved one, safe deposit box, etc.) so we don't miss your take on life. Someone (can't know who) may benefit and spend a moment thanking you.
- anowlcalledjosh 10y ago
  Shamir's Secret Sharing[1] seems like it would be a good mechanism to encrypt decryption keys with - you can give a part of the key to several people, and require that a certain number of them put their keys together to decrypt the information. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing
  - theoh 10y ago
    Shamir's approach is just one option for secret sharing, so you are being overly specific. The Wikipedia page for secret sharing links to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine Apparently the word has been use to refer to secret sharing. It hints at the problem with using this strategy to preserve access to encrypted data: all the sharing parties will die eventually.

by kijin 10y ago

acdha 10y ago

I think this is going to be a big problem, even without the specific hard-failure mode of encryption — people are generating tons and tons of data and most of it goes in the same place and is frequently hard to manage. A generation ago, when someone died their next of kin were probably going to be reasonably comfortable donating the contents of their office to the local university — you could quickly scan to see if there was anything truly bizarre hidden in the closet, most people didn't take that many photographs (especially NSFW ones, what with meddling clerks) and you could quickly look over the ones they did have to make sure there wasn't anything you wanted, etc. Now, though, almost everyone carries around high-quality cameras and generates gigabytes a year of geo-located pictures. Many casual conversations which would have been lost forever are now recorded. Some of it might be easy to exclude (“Scholars will just have to live without the Chief Justice's online dating history”) but it's hard to imagine being able to quickly go through a mixed service like Facebook or a cloud photo backup service without some potentially embarrassing oversights. I'd bet the most likely outcome of this would be scholars having to wait for increasingly long embargo periods to expire to avoid the odds of data-mining or computer vision finding unwanted links to people who are still alive. That's not to say that this didn't happen in the past – a good example was the time that Justice Thurgood Marshall donated his papers to the Library of Congress under terms allowing access after his death, leading to a minor firestorm when a clever Washington Post reporter used them for insights about other people who were still serving on the Supreme Court: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/26/us/chief-justice-assails-library-on-release-of-marshall-papers.html http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/26/us/chief-justice-assails-l...

ridgeguy 10y ago

If your data dies with you, the rest of us lose whatever insight your data might have given us. Suggestion: leave decryption instructions with (attorney, loved one, safe deposit box, etc.) so we don't miss your take on life. Someone (can't know who) may benefit and spend a moment thanking you.

anowlcalledjosh 10y ago
Shamir's Secret Sharing[1] seems like it would be a good mechanism to encrypt decryption keys with - you can give a part of the key to several people, and require that a certain number of them put their keys together to decrypt the information. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing
- theoh 10y ago
  Shamir's approach is just one option for secret sharing, so you are being overly specific. The Wikipedia page for secret sharing links to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine Apparently the word has been use to refer to secret sharing. It hints at the problem with using this strategy to preserve access to encrypted data: all the sharing parties will die eventually.