3 ms·

Fine, but privacy is privacy. I'm no fan of advertisers either, but if you're going to invoke Shannon let's use the right terms and stay intellectually consiste

Fine, but privacy is privacy. I'm no fan of advertisers either, but if you're going to invoke Shannon let's use the right terms and stay intellectually consistent.

throwaway81523 2y ago
Do you understand Shannon's definition? Have I made a mistake somewhere? Differential privacy as I understood it is a statistical notion. It gives the advertiser a noisy average of the behaviour of a large group but not about the individual users in the group. Mozilla pulls a switcheroo saying that the individual info is protected so everything is fine. In fact the statistical info is invasive too, and that's Shannon's notion. The system is private if the information gained by the adversary is exactly zero. Also, "advertiser" is way too benign a term: in cryptography we generally use "adversary". Consider that in this election season, the Trump and Biden political campaigns will be among the biggest advertisers. Mozilla will sell them information and they will use it. Question: will they only use it to solicit votes, or will they also use it to help round up their enemies if they get into power? And yes, they can use statistical information for that. The first thing they will want to know about any specific class of enemy is how many of them there are, before worrying about identifying individuals. So Mozilla shouldn't help them with either.
- striking 2y ago
  Does Shannon actually have a concrete definition of "privacy"? Maybe you're confusing it with "perfect secrecy", which is a cryptographic measure I'm not sure applies here. > Mozilla will give them information and they will use it. Let's just get on the same page about what information the advertisers get. I'll reproduce the paragraph I linked to: > Since the DAP server acts as a middleman, and reports are only generated at conversion times (impressions without conversions are not reported), ad networks have no way through this method of collecting your personal information (such as your user information or your IP address/browser client info). All they receive is an aggregate that informs them that their ad y (published on source x) led number of people to a positive outcome for their customer over a period of time p. Some amount of noise is also added to the information in order to further strengthen privacy[7]. I'm not aware of how you "round up your enemies" using conversion rate information on websites. It doesn't even tell you how many "specific class of enemy" there is, it's too muddled by the variable of the click rate of the audience. Not to mention that as state actors I'm sure they would have other, more useful and reliable methods of doing... whatever you're accusing them of doing.
  - throwaway81523 2y ago
    > Does Shannon actually have a concrete definition of "privacy"? Maybe you're confusing it with "perfect secrecy", which is a cryptographic measure I'm not sure applies here. Perfect secrecy is the standard that a browser calling itself privacy preserving should use. It should give the adversary no information that they don't already have. The concept of browser privacy of course didn't exist when Shannon wrote his paper. > I'm not aware of how you "round up your enemies" using conversion rate information on websites. It doesn't even tell you how many "specific class of enemy" there is, it's too muddled by the variable of the click rate of the audience. The adversary can make a statistical estimate before getting the conversion rate, and another one that has been conditioned on the conversion rate. If the two estimates aren't the same, they have gained information, so Shannon secrecy has failed. Why do you make this so complicated? Mozilla runs this program and if you participate in it, your adversaries benefit from your participation. So do you want to participate? More concretely, what do you think of Mozilla opting you in by default? Which side did they say they were on?
    - striking 2y ago
      > Perfect secrecy is the standard that a browser calling itself privacy preserving should use. I'm not convinced. It sounds nice, but why? We already know Mozilla's counterargument, and in my personal experience of having thrown chaff in the way of annoying interlopers before, it seems reasonable. > If the two estimates aren't the same, they have gained information Okay, so by my understanding, now the goalposts are all the way out to being unable to capture the count of enemies but being able to verify the count? I feel like this is a long way from the original argument (in either intention or phrasing). > Why do you make this so complicated? Because I have at least a passing interest in nuance. It's not great that Mozilla hasn't learned from the Pocket debacle, and I am glad that folks like yourself are understandably angry about being opted into something that benefits others without not just consent but even notification, because pushing back on stuff like this even on principle is commendable. We don't disagree on that being wrong. I would just prefer we discuss facts based in reality and focus our conversation, because that makes change more effective. If you want a blanket ban on advertisers across the web, I'm in agreement with you. If you want Mozilla to stop shipping potentially privacy-affecting changes without consent or notification, I'm in agreement with you. But the actual system they describe and their reasoning for implementing it is, in my mind, relatively sound.
- squigz 2y ago
  > Question: will they only use it to solicit votes, or will they also use it to help round up their enemies if they get into power? What a pointless bit of FUD in an otherwise fairly rational comment.
  - throwaway81523 2y ago
    Truth is stranger than fiction. From https://www.wired.com/2007/11/httpblogsabcnew/ https://www.wired.com/2007/11/httpblogsabcnew/ (the cited Congressional Quarterly article now seems offline): "The FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists," CQ's Jeff Stein reports. "The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area. "The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal." So we escaped that time. What about now? Don't forget that thanks to the Supreme Court, the President is now immune from prosecution.

Fine, but privacy is privacy. I'm no fan of advertisers either, but if you're going to invoke Shannon let's use the right terms and stay intellectually consistent.

throwaway81523 2y ago

Do you understand Shannon's definition? Have I made a mistake somewhere? Differential privacy as I understood it is a statistical notion. It gives the advertiser a noisy average of the behaviour of a large group but not about the individual users in the group. Mozilla pulls a switcheroo saying that the individual info is protected so everything is fine. In fact the statistical info is invasive too, and that's Shannon's notion. The system is private if the information gained by the adversary is exactly zero. Also, "advertiser" is way too benign a term: in cryptography we generally use "adversary". Consider that in this election season, the Trump and Biden political campaigns will be among the biggest advertisers. Mozilla will sell them information and they will use it. Question: will they only use it to solicit votes, or will they also use it to help round up their enemies if they get into power? And yes, they can use statistical information for that. The first thing they will want to know about any specific class of enemy is how many of them there are, before worrying about identifying individuals. So Mozilla shouldn't help them with either.

striking 2y ago
Does Shannon actually have a concrete definition of "privacy"? Maybe you're confusing it with "perfect secrecy", which is a cryptographic measure I'm not sure applies here. > Mozilla will give them information and they will use it. Let's just get on the same page about what information the advertisers get. I'll reproduce the paragraph I linked to: > Since the DAP server acts as a middleman, and reports are only generated at conversion times (impressions without conversions are not reported), ad networks have no way through this method of collecting your personal information (such as your user information or your IP address/browser client info). All they receive is an aggregate that informs them that their ad y (published on source x) led number of people to a positive outcome for their customer over a period of time p. Some amount of noise is also added to the information in order to further strengthen privacy[7]. I'm not aware of how you "round up your enemies" using conversion rate information on websites. It doesn't even tell you how many "specific class of enemy" there is, it's too muddled by the variable of the click rate of the audience. Not to mention that as state actors I'm sure they would have other, more useful and reliable methods of doing... whatever you're accusing them of doing.
- throwaway81523 2y ago
  > Does Shannon actually have a concrete definition of "privacy"? Maybe you're confusing it with "perfect secrecy", which is a cryptographic measure I'm not sure applies here. Perfect secrecy is the standard that a browser calling itself privacy preserving should use. It should give the adversary no information that they don't already have. The concept of browser privacy of course didn't exist when Shannon wrote his paper. > I'm not aware of how you "round up your enemies" using conversion rate information on websites. It doesn't even tell you how many "specific class of enemy" there is, it's too muddled by the variable of the click rate of the audience. The adversary can make a statistical estimate before getting the conversion rate, and another one that has been conditioned on the conversion rate. If the two estimates aren't the same, they have gained information, so Shannon secrecy has failed. Why do you make this so complicated? Mozilla runs this program and if you participate in it, your adversaries benefit from your participation. So do you want to participate? More concretely, what do you think of Mozilla opting you in by default? Which side did they say they were on?
  - striking 2y ago
    > Perfect secrecy is the standard that a browser calling itself privacy preserving should use. I'm not convinced. It sounds nice, but why? We already know Mozilla's counterargument, and in my personal experience of having thrown chaff in the way of annoying interlopers before, it seems reasonable. > If the two estimates aren't the same, they have gained information Okay, so by my understanding, now the goalposts are all the way out to being unable to capture the count of enemies but being able to verify the count? I feel like this is a long way from the original argument (in either intention or phrasing). > Why do you make this so complicated? Because I have at least a passing interest in nuance. It's not great that Mozilla hasn't learned from the Pocket debacle, and I am glad that folks like yourself are understandably angry about being opted into something that benefits others without not just consent but even notification, because pushing back on stuff like this even on principle is commendable. We don't disagree on that being wrong. I would just prefer we discuss facts based in reality and focus our conversation, because that makes change more effective. If you want a blanket ban on advertisers across the web, I'm in agreement with you. If you want Mozilla to stop shipping potentially privacy-affecting changes without consent or notification, I'm in agreement with you. But the actual system they describe and their reasoning for implementing it is, in my mind, relatively sound.
squigz 2y ago
> Question: will they only use it to solicit votes, or will they also use it to help round up their enemies if they get into power? What a pointless bit of FUD in an otherwise fairly rational comment.
- throwaway81523 2y ago
  Truth is stranger than fiction. From https://www.wired.com/2007/11/httpblogsabcnew/ https://www.wired.com/2007/11/httpblogsabcnew/ (the cited Congressional Quarterly article now seems offline): "The FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists," CQ's Jeff Stein reports. "The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area. "The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal." So we escaped that time. What about now? Don't forget that thanks to the Supreme Court, the President is now immune from prosecution.