5 ms·

> That's fine, but your reason seems suspicious. I prefer to avoid living my life in a fishbowl. > provably private This does not have a mathematics definiti

> That's fine, but your reason seems suspicious. I prefer to avoid living my life in a fishbowl. > provably private This does not have a mathematics definition. Private means not accessible to anyone aside from the owner. That is something that is provably private. > information theoretic guarantee This sounds like hand waving to get rid of actual concerns.

j2kun 12y ago
Again, you are disagreeing with their chosen definition for a word you prefer to think of in a different way. Maybe you should study the issue instead of griping about how lame their version is. What does accessible mean? Who is the owner of a piece of data? For example, just because of our interaction here, I could probably get a pretty good estimate of your occupation, age, and gender. Is that "accessing" something? If so, does that mean speaking is enough to break privacy? Do you "own" your age and gender? If this conversation is enough for me to determine your age and gender, do you own this conversation?
- cheatsheet 12y ago
  Definitions of words matter when people skim text as to determine how they communicate their opinions, form their opinions, and take action, including writing legislation. If I was actually typing out the opinions of my spouse word for word: whose age combined with my own is divisible by 3, how would that change your view?
  - j2kun 12y ago
    Of course definitions matter. My point is that your definition is not specific enough to be useful.
    - cheatsheet 12y ago
      Yours is mathematically nonsensical. You either have discrete containers that denote privacy relations between information and parties or you do not have it at all. Privacy does not exist on a gradient on a computer. You can not calculate the percentage of how private something is. If it is marked 'private information' and that information is released to a party not under the user / group / role term that is supposed to have access to that category of information, then that information ceases to be private.
      - Double_Cast 12y ago
        You're discussing a different problem. You're using "private" in a legal sense. As in "it's either legal or it's not". Passing privacy laws is certainly a good idea and is what the DDG post is advocating. j2kun was bringing up another solution to privacy which was cryptographic rather than legal. Cryptographers generally use "private" in a "is it physically possible for a bad actor to decrypt this" sense. In which case, there's always a possibility that bad actor can access it. It's just a question of "how likely?" (any encryption requiring a deciphering-technique which takes more than polynomial-time to crack is considered good-enough). In order for the data to be of any use, someone (be it the user or a trusted friend) has to be able to decrypt it. But if you (or your friend) can decrypt it, a hacker can also decrypt it. Hopefully, the hacker will find it more difficult without knowing the key. But the one in a million chance that he'll crack it on the first try exists by necessity.Even titanium breaks under stress. In the pathological case that there's zero possibility (not even epsilon), the whole business of encryption is rendered moot because the rightful user himself cannot access the data! This means one of two things: the data is corrupt; or the data has been deleted entirely.
        cheatsheet 12y ago
        Computer security has more subfields than cryptography. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_flow_%28information_theory%29#Security_type_system http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_flow_%28informati...
      - j2kun 12y ago
        Again, you are revealing your ignorance of mathematics and arguing that you don't like the way a word is used in a context you don't understand.
        deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
        cheatsheet 12y ago
        Okay, but those ad hominem attacks won't stop some people from training their machines better than implementations of these algorithms can manage the complexities between data kinds and data object noise.
Retra 12y ago
If you think privacy is "power over what others perceive", then you are being selfish and short-sighted in a way that prevents mutual privacy, and is thus generally untenable.
- cheatsheet 12y ago
  That would be fine, if the 'people who perceive' would realize perception is much more variant and undecidable than 'people who perceive' acknowledge.

j2kun 12y ago

Again, you are disagreeing with their chosen definition for a word you prefer to think of in a different way. Maybe you should study the issue instead of griping about how lame their version is. What does accessible mean? Who is the owner of a piece of data? For example, just because of our interaction here, I could probably get a pretty good estimate of your occupation, age, and gender. Is that "accessing" something? If so, does that mean speaking is enough to break privacy? Do you "own" your age and gender? If this conversation is enough for me to determine your age and gender, do you own this conversation?

cheatsheet 12y ago
Definitions of words matter when people skim text as to determine how they communicate their opinions, form their opinions, and take action, including writing legislation. If I was actually typing out the opinions of my spouse word for word: whose age combined with my own is divisible by 3, how would that change your view?
- j2kun 12y ago
  Of course definitions matter. My point is that your definition is not specific enough to be useful.
  - cheatsheet 12y ago
    Yours is mathematically nonsensical. You either have discrete containers that denote privacy relations between information and parties or you do not have it at all. Privacy does not exist on a gradient on a computer. You can not calculate the percentage of how private something is. If it is marked 'private information' and that information is released to a party not under the user / group / role term that is supposed to have access to that category of information, then that information ceases to be private.
    - Double_Cast 12y ago
      You're discussing a different problem. You're using "private" in a legal sense. As in "it's either legal or it's not". Passing privacy laws is certainly a good idea and is what the DDG post is advocating. j2kun was bringing up another solution to privacy which was cryptographic rather than legal. Cryptographers generally use "private" in a "is it physically possible for a bad actor to decrypt this" sense. In which case, there's always a possibility that bad actor can access it. It's just a question of "how likely?" (any encryption requiring a deciphering-technique which takes more than polynomial-time to crack is considered good-enough). In order for the data to be of any use, someone (be it the user or a trusted friend) has to be able to decrypt it. But if you (or your friend) can decrypt it, a hacker can also decrypt it. Hopefully, the hacker will find it more difficult without knowing the key. But the one in a million chance that he'll crack it on the first try exists by necessity.Even titanium breaks under stress. In the pathological case that there's zero possibility (not even epsilon), the whole business of encryption is rendered moot because the rightful user himself cannot access the data! This means one of two things: the data is corrupt; or the data has been deleted entirely.
      - cheatsheet 12y ago
        Computer security has more subfields than cryptography. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_flow_%28information_theory%29#Security_type_system http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_flow_%28informati...
    - j2kun 12y ago
      Again, you are revealing your ignorance of mathematics and arguing that you don't like the way a word is used in a context you don't understand.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - cheatsheet 12y ago
        Okay, but those ad hominem attacks won't stop some people from training their machines better than implementations of these algorithms can manage the complexities between data kinds and data object noise.

Retra 12y ago

If you think privacy is "power over what others perceive", then you are being selfish and short-sighted in a way that prevents mutual privacy, and is thus generally untenable.

cheatsheet 12y ago
That would be fine, if the 'people who perceive' would realize perception is much more variant and undecidable than 'people who perceive' acknowledge.