Bruce Schneier Facebook Page
I finally have control of my Facebook page. There’ll be nothing on it that isn’t on my blog, but some of you might prefer following my writing from there.
(I also have a Twitter account, although I’ve never posted.)
Entries Tagged "Facebook"
Page 10 of 11
Privacy Violations by Facebook Employees
I don’t know if this is real, but it seems perfectly reasonable that all of Facebook is stored in a huge database that someone with the proper permissions can access and modify. And it also makes sense that developers and others would need the ability to assume anyone’s identity.
Rumpus: You’ve previously mentioned a master password, which you no longer use.
Employee: I’m not sure when exactly it was deprecated, but we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user’s user ID, and then the password. I’m not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out ‘Chuck Norris,’ more or less. It was pretty fantastic.
Rumpus: This was accessible by any Facebook employee?
Employee: Technically, yes. But it was pretty much limited to the original engineers, who were basically the only people who knew about it. It wasn’t as if random people in Human Resources were using this password to log into profiles. It was made and designed for engineering reasons. But it was there, and any employee could find it if they knew where to look.
I should also say that it was only available internally. If I were to log in from a high school or library, I couldn’t use it. You had to be in the Facebook office, using the Facebook ISP.
Rumpus: Do you think Facebook employees ever abused the privilege of having universal access?
Employee: I know it has happened in the past, because at least two people have been fired for it that I know of.
[…]
Employee: See, the thing is—and I don’t know how much you know about it—it’s all stored in a database on the backend. Literally everything. Your messages are stored in a database, whether deleted or not. So we can just query the database, and easily look at it without every logging into your account. That’s what most people don’t understand.
Rumpus: So the master password is basically irrelevant.
Employee: Yeah.
Rumpus: It’s just for style.
Employee: Right. But it’s no longer in use. Like I alluded to, we’ve cracked down on this lately, but it has been replaced by a pretty cool tool. If I visited your profile, for example, on our closed network, there’s a ‘switch login’ button. I literally just click it, explain why I’m logging in as you, click ‘OK,’ and I’m you. You can do it as long as you have an explanation, because you’d better be able to back it up. For example, if you’re investigating a compromised account, you have to actually be able to log into that account.
Rumpus: Are your managers really on your ass about it every time you log in as someone else?
Employee: No, but if it comes up, you’d better be able to justify it. Or you will be fired.
Rumpus: What did they do?
Employee: I know one of them went in and manipulated some other person’s data, changed their religious views or something like that. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but he got reported, got found out, got fired.
Helpful Hint for Fugitives: Don't Update Your Location on Facebook
“Fugitive caught after updating his status on Facebook.”
Investigators scoured social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace but initially could find no trace of him and were unable to pin down his location in Mexico.
Several months later, a secret service agent, Seth Reeg, checked Facebook again and up popped MaxiSopo. His photo showed him partying in front of a backdrop featuring logos of BMW and Courvoisier cognac, sporting a black jacket adorned with a not-so-subtle white lion.
Although Sopo’s profile was set to private, his list of friends was not. Scoville started combing through it and was surprised to see that one friend listed an affiliation with the justice department. He sent a message requesting a phone call.
“We figured this was a person we could probably trust to keep our inquiry discreet,” Scoville said.
Proving the 2.0 adage that a friend on Facebook is rarely a friend indeed, the former official said he had met Sopo in Cancun’s nightclubs a few times, but did not really know him and had no idea he was a fugitive. The official learned where Sopo was living and passed that information back to Scoville, who provided it to Mexican authorities. They arrested Sopo last month.
It’s easy to say “so dumb,” and it would be true, but what’s interesting is how people just don’t think through the privacy implications of putting their information on the Internet. Facebook is how we interact with friends, and we think of it in the frame of interacting with friends. We don’t think that our employers might be looking—they’re not our friends!—that the information will be around forever, or that it might be abused. Privacy isn’t salient; chatting with friends is.
Predicting Characteristics of People by the Company they Keep
Turns out “gaydar” can be automated:
Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said. People may be effectively “outing” themselves just by the virtual company they keep.
This sort of thing can be generalized:
The work has not been published in a scientific journal, but it provides a provocative warning note about privacy. Discussions of privacy often focus on how to best keep things secret, whether it is making sure online financial transactions are secure from intruders, or telling people to think twice before opening their lives too widely on blogs or online profiles. But this work shows that people may reveal information about themselves in another way, and without knowing they are making it public. Who we are can be revealed by, and even defined by, who our friends are: if all your friends are over 45, you’re probably not a teenager; if they all belong to a particular religion, it’s a decent bet that you do, too. The ability to connect with other people who have something in common is part of the power of social networks, but also a possible pitfall. If our friends reveal who we are, that challenges a conception of privacy built on the notion that there are things we tell, and things we don’t.
EDITED TO ADD (9/29): Better information from the MIT Newspaper.
File Deletion
File deletion is all about control. This used to not be an issue. Your data was on your computer, and you decided when and how to delete a file. You could use the delete function if you didn’t care about whether the file could be recovered or not, and a file erase program—I use BCWipe for Windows—if you wanted to ensure no one could ever recover the file.
As we move more of our data onto cloud computing platforms such as Gmail and Facebook, and closed proprietary platforms such as the Kindle and the iPhone, deleting data is much harder.
You have to trust that these companies will delete your data when you ask them to, but they’re generally not interested in doing so. Sites like these are more likely to make your data inaccessible than they are to physically delete it. Facebook is a known culprit: actually deleting your data from its servers requires a complicated procedure that may or may not work. And even if you do manage to delete your data, copies are certain to remain in the companies’ backup systems. Gmail explicitly says this in its privacy notice.
Online backups, SMS messages, photos on photo sharing sites, smartphone applications that store your data in the network: you have no idea what really happens when you delete pieces of data or your entire account, because you’re not in control of the computers that are storing the data.
This notion of control also explains how Amazon was able to delete a book that people had previously purchased on their Kindle e-book readers. The legalities are debatable, but Amazon had the technical ability to delete the file because it controls all Kindles. It has designed the Kindle so that it determines when to update the software, whether people are allowed to buy Kindle books, and when to turn off people’s Kindles entirely.
Vanish is a research project by Roxana Geambasu and colleagues at the University of Washington. They designed a prototype system that automatically deletes data after a set time interval. So you can send an email, create a Google Doc, post an update to Facebook, or upload a photo to Flickr, all designed to disappear after a set period of time. And after it disappears, no one—not anyone who downloaded the data, not the site that hosted the data, not anyone who intercepted the data in transit, not even you—will be able to read it. If the police arrive at Facebook or Google or Flickr with a warrant, they won’t be able to read it.
The details are complicated, but Vanish breaks the data’s decryption key into a bunch of pieces and scatters them around the web using a peer-to-peer network. Then it uses the natural turnover in these networks—machines constantly join and leave—to make the data disappear. Unlike previous programs that supported file deletion, this one doesn’t require you to trust any company, organisation, or website. It just happens.
Of course, Vanish doesn’t prevent the recipient of an email or the reader of a Facebook page from copying the data and pasting it into another file, just as Kindle’s deletion feature doesn’t prevent people from copying a book’s files and saving them on their computers. Vanish is just a prototype at this point, and it only works if all the people who read your Facebook entries or view your Flickr pictures have it installed on their computers as well; but it’s a good demonstration of how control affects file deletion. And while it’s a step in the right direction, it’s also new and therefore deserves further security analysis before being adopted on a wide scale.
We’ve lost the control of data on some of the computers we own, and we’ve lost control of our data in the cloud. We’re not going to stop using Facebook and Twitter just because they’re not going to delete our data when we ask them to, and we’re not going to stop using Kindles and iPhones because they may delete our data when we don’t want them to. But we need to take back control of data in the cloud, and projects like Vanish show us how we can.
Now we need something that will protect our data when a large corporation decides to delete it.
This essay originally appeared in The Guardian.
Privacy Salience and Social Networking Sites
Reassuring people about privacy makes them more, not less, concerned. It’s called “privacy salience,” and Leslie John, Alessandro Acquisti, and George Loewenstein—all at Carnegie Mellon University—demonstrated this in a series of clever experiments. In one, subjects completed an online survey consisting of a series of questions about their academic behavior—”Have you ever cheated on an exam?” for example. Half of the subjects were first required to sign a consent warning—designed to make privacy concerns more salient—while the other half did not. Also, subjects were randomly assigned to receive either a privacy confidentiality assurance, or no such assurance. When the privacy concern was made salient (through the consent warning), people reacted negatively to the subsequent confidentiality assurance and were less likely to reveal personal information.
In another experiment, subjects completed an online survey where they were asked a series of personal questions, such as “Have you ever tried cocaine?” Half of the subjects completed a frivolous-looking survey—”How BAD are U??”—with a picture of a cute devil. The other half completed the same survey with the title “Carnegie Mellon University Survey of Ethical Standards,” complete with a university seal and official privacy assurances. The results showed that people who were reminded about privacy were less likely to reveal personal information than those who were not.
Privacy salience does a lot to explain social networking sites and their attitudes towards privacy. From a business perspective, social networking sites don’t want their members to exercise their privacy rights very much. They want members to be comfortable disclosing a lot of data about themselves.
Joseph Bonneau and Soeren Preibusch of Cambridge University have been studying privacy on 45 popular social networking sites around the world. (You may not have realized that there are 45 popular social networking sites around the world.) They found that privacy settings were often confusing and hard to access; Facebook, with its 61 privacy settings, is the worst. To understand some of the settings, they had to create accounts with different settings so they could compare the results. Privacy tends to increase with the age and popularity of a site. General-use sites tend to have more privacy features than niche sites.
But their most interesting finding was that sites consistently hide any mentions of privacy. Their splash pages talk about connecting with friends, meeting new people, sharing pictures: the benefits of disclosing personal data.
These sites do talk about privacy, but only on hard-to-find privacy policy pages. There, the sites give strong reassurances about their privacy controls and the safety of data members choose to disclose on the site. There, the sites display third-party privacy seals and other icons designed to assuage any fears members have.
It’s the Carnegie Mellon experimental result in the real world. Users care about privacy, but don’t really think about it day to day. The social networking sites don’t want to remind users about privacy, even if they talk about it positively, because any reminder will result in users remembering their privacy fears and becoming more cautious about sharing personal data. But the sites also need to reassure those “privacy fundamentalists” for whom privacy is always salient, so they have very strong pro-privacy rhetoric for those who take the time to search them out. The two different marketing messages are for two different audiences.
Social networking sites are improving their privacy controls as a result of public pressure. At the same time, there is a counterbalancing business pressure to decrease privacy; watch what’s going on right now on Facebook, for example. Naively, we should expect companies to make their privacy policies clear to allow customers to make an informed choice. But the marketing need to reduce privacy salience will frustrate market solutions to improve privacy; sites would much rather obfuscate the issue than compete on it as a feature.
This essay originally appeared in the Guardian.
Second SHB Workshop Liveblogging (8)
The penultimate session of the conference was “Privacy,” moderated by Tyler Moore.
Alessandro Acquisti, Carnegie Mellon University (suggested reading: What Can Behavioral Economics Teach Us About Privacy?; Privacy in Electronic Commerce and the Economics of Immediate Gratification), presented research on how people value their privacy. He started by listing a variety of cognitive biases that affect privacy decisions: illusion of control, overconfidence, optimism bias, endowment effect, and so on. He discussed two experiments. The first demonstrated a “herding effect”: if a subject believes that others reveal sensitive behavior, the subject is more likely to also reveal sensitive behavior. The second examined the “frog effect”: do privacy intrusions alert or desensitize people to revealing personal information? What he found is that people tend to set their privacy level at the beginning of a survey, and don’t respond well to being asked easy questions at first and then sensitive questions at the end. In the discussion, Joe Bonneau asked him about the notion that people’s privacy protections tend to ratchet up over time; he didn’t have conclusive evidence, but gave several possible explanations for the phenomenon.
Adam Joinson, University of Bath (suggested reading: Privacy, Trust and Self-Disclosure Online; Privacy concerns and privacy actions), also studies how people value their privacy. He talked about expressive privacy—privacy that allows people to express themselves and form interpersonal relationships. His research showed that differences between how people use Facebook in different countries depend on how much people trust Facebook as a company, rather than how much people trust other Facebook users. Another study looked at posts from Secret Tweet and Twitter. He found 16 markers that allowed him to automatically determine which tweets contain sensitive personal information and which do not, with high probability. Then he tried to determine if people with large Twitter followings post fewer secrets than people who are only twittering to a few people. He found absolutely no difference.
Peter Neumann, SRI (suggested reading: Holistic systems; Risks; Identity and Trust in Context), talked about lack of medical privacy (too many people have access to your data), about voting (the privacy problem makes the voting problem a lot harder, and the end-to-end voting security/privacy problem is much harder than just securing voting machines), and privacy in China (the government is requiring all computers sold in China to be sold with software allowing them to eavesdrop on the users). Any would-be solution needs to reflect the ubiquity of the threat. When we design systems, we need to anticipate what the privacy problems will be. Privacy problems are everywhere you look, and ordinary people have no idea of the depth of the problem.
Eric Johnson, Dartmouth College (suggested reading: Access Flexibility with Escalation and Audit; Security through Information Risk Management), studies the information access problem from a business perspective. He’s been doing field studies in companies like retail banks and investment banks, and found that role-based access control fails because companies can’t determine who has what role. Even worse, roles change quickly, especially in large complex organizations. For example, one business group of 3000 people experiences 1000 role changes within three months. The result is that organizations do access control badly, either over-entitling or under-entitling people. But since getting the job done is the most important thing, organizations tend to over-entitle: give people more access than they need. His current work is to find the right set of incentives and controls to set access more properly. The challege is to do this without making people risk averse. In the discussion, he agreed that a perfect access control system is not possible, and that organizations should probably allow a certain amount of access control violations—similar to the idea of posting a 55 mph speed limit but not ticketing people unless they go over 70 mph.
Christine Jolls, Yale Law School (suggested reading: Rationality and Consent in Privacy Law, Employee Privacy), made the point that people regularly share their most private information with their intimates—so privacy is not about secrecy, it’s more about control. There are moments when people make pretty big privacy decisions. For example, they grant employers the rights to monitor their e-mail, or test their urine without notice. In general, courts hold that blanket signing away of privacy rights—”you can test my urine on any day in the future”—are not valid, but immediate signing away of privacy of privacy rights—”you can test my urine today”—are. Jolls believes that this is reasonable for several reasons, such as optimism bias and an overfocus on the present at the expense of the future. Without realizing it, the courts have implemented the system that behavioral economics would find optimal. During the discussion, she talked about how coercion figures into this; the U.S. legal system tends not to be concerned with it.
Andrew Adams, University of Reading (suggested reading: Regulating CCTV), also looks at attitudes of privacy on social networking services. His results are preliminary, and based on interviews with university students in Canada, Japan, and the UK, and are very concordant with what danah boyd and Joe Bonneau said earlier. From the UK: People join social networking sites to increase their level of interaction with people they already know in real life. Revealing personal information is okay, but revealing too much is bad. Even more interestingly, it’s not okay to reveal more about others than they reveal themselves. From Japan: People are more open to making friends online. There’s more anonymity. It’s not okay to reveal information about others, but “the fault of this lies as much with the person whose data was revealed in not choosing friends wisely.” This victim responsibility is a common theme with other privacy and security elements in Japan. Data from Canada is still being compiled.
Great phrase: the “laundry belt”—close enough for students to go home on weekends with their laundry, but far enough away so they don’t feel as if their parents are looking over their shoulder—typically two hours by public transportation (in the UK).
Adam Shostack’s liveblogging is here. Ross Anderson’s liveblogging is in his blog post’s comments. Matt Blaze’s audio is here.
Second SHB Workshop Liveblogging (6)
The first session of the morning was “Foundations,” which is kind of a catch-all for a variety of things that didn’t really fit anywhere else. Rachel Greenstadt moderated.
Terence Taylor, International Council for the Live Sciences (suggested video to watch: Darwinian Security; Natural Security), talked about the lessons evolution teaches about living with risk. Successful species didn’t survive by eliminating the risks of their environment, they survived by adaptation. Adaptation isn’t always what you think. For example, you could view the collapse of the Soviet Union as a failure to adapt, but you could also view it as successful adaptation. Risk is good. Risk is essential for the survival of a society, because risk-takers are the drivers of change. In the discussion phase, John Mueller pointed out a key difference between human and biological systems: humans tend to respond dramatically to anomalous events (the anthrax attacks), while biological systems respond to sustained change. And David Livingstone Smith asked about the difference between biological adaptation that affects the reproductive success of an organism’s genes, even at the expense of the organism, with security adaptation. (I recommend the book he edited: Natural Security: A Darwinian Approach to a Dangerous World.)
Andrew Odlyzko, University of Minnesota (suggested reading: Network Neutrality, Search Neutrality, and the Never-Ending Conflict between Efficiency and Fairness in Markets, Economics, Psychology, and Sociology of Security), discussed human-space vs. cyberspace. People cannot build secure systems—we know that—but people also cannot live with secure systems. We require a certain amount of flexibility in our systems. And finally, people don’t need secure systems. We survive with an astounding amount of insecurity in our world. The problem with cyberspace is that it was originally conceived as separate from the physical world, and that it could correct for the inadequacies of the physical world. Really, the two are intertwined, and that human space more often corrects for the inadequacies of cyberspace. Lessons: build messy systems, not clean ones; create a web of ties to other systems; create permanent records.
danah boyd, Microsoft Research (suggested reading: Taken Out of Context—American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics), does ethnographic studies of teens in cyberspace. Teens tend not to lie to their friends in cyberspace, but they lie to the system. Since an early age, they’ve been taught that they need to lie online to be safe. Teens regularly share their passwords: with their parents when forced, or with their best friend or significant other. This is a way of demonstrating trust. It’s part of the social protocol for this generation. In general, teens don’t use social media in the same way as adults do. And when they grow up, they won’t use social media in the same way as today’s adults do. Teens view privacy in terms of control, and take their cues about privacy from celebrities and how they use social media. And their sense of privacy is much more nuanced and complicated. In the discussion phase, danah wasn’t sure whether the younger generation would be more or less susceptible to Internet scams than the rest of us—they’re not nearly as technically savvy as we might think they are. “The only thing that saves teenagers is fear of their parents”; they try to lock them out, and lock others out in the process. Socio-economic status matters a lot, in ways that she is still trying to figure out. There are three different types of social networks: personal networks, articulated networks, and behavioral networks, and they’re different.
Mark Levine, Lancaster University (suggested reading: The Kindness of Crowds; Intra-group Regulation of Violence: Bystanders and the (De)-escalation of Violence), does social psychology. He argued against the common belief that groups are bad (mob violence, mass hysteria, peer group pressure). He collected data from UK CCTV cameras, searches for aggressive behavior, and studies when and how bystanders either help escalate or de-escalate the situations. Results: as groups get bigger, there is no increase of anti-social acts and a significant increase in pro-social acts. He has much more analysis and results, too complicated to summarize here. One key finding: when a third party intervenes in an aggressive interaction, it is much more likely to de-escalate. Basically, groups can act against violence. “When it comes to violence (and security), group processes are part of the solution—not part of the problem?”
Jeff MacKie-Mason, University of Michigan (suggested reading: Humans are smart devices, but not programmable; Security when people matter; A Social Mechanism for Supporting Home Computer Security), is an economist: “Security problems are incentive problems.” He discussed motivation, and how to design systems to take motivation into account. Humans are smart devices; they can’t be programmed, but they can be influenced through the sciences of motivational behavior: microeconomics, game theory, social psychology, psychodynamics, and personality psychology. He gave a couple of general examples of how these theories can inform security system design.
Joe Bonneau, Cambridge University, talked about social networks like Facebook, and privacy. People misunderstand why privacy and security is important in social networking sites like Facebook. People underestimate of what Facebook really is; it really is a reimplementation of the entire Internet. “Everything on the Internet is becoming social,” and that makes security different. Phishing is different, 419-style scams are different. Social context makes some scams easier; social networks are fun, noisy, and unpredictable. “People use social networking systems with their brain turned off.” But social context can be used to spot frauds and anomalies, and can be used to establish trust.
Three more sessions to go. (I am enjoying liveblogging the event. It’s helping me focus and pay closer attention.)
Adam Shostack’s liveblogging is here. Ross Anderson’s liveblogging is in his blog post’s comments. Matt Blaze’s audio is here.
Second SHB Workshop Liveblogging (5)
David Livingstone Smith moderated the fourth session, about (more or less) methodology.
Angela Sasse, University College London (suggested reading: The Compliance Budget: Managing Security Behaviour in Organisations; Human Vulnerabilities in Security Systems), has been working on usable security for over a dozen years. As part of a project called “Trust Economics,” she looked at whether people comply with security policies and why they either do or do not. She found that there is a limit to the amount of effort people will make to comply—this is less actual cost and more perceived cost. Strict and simple policies will be complied with more than permissive but complex policies. Compliance detection, and reward or punishment, also affect compliance. People justify noncompliance by “frequently made excuses.”
Bashar Nuseibeh, Open University (suggested reading: A Multi-Pronged Empirical Approach to Mobile Privacy Investigation; Security Requirements Engineering: A Framework for Representation and Analysis), talked about mobile phone security; specifically, Facebook privacy on mobile phones. He did something clever in his experiments. Because he wasn’t able to interview people at the moment they did something—he worked with mobile users—he asked them to provide a “memory phrase” that allowed him to effectively conduct detailed interviews at a later time. This worked very well, and resulted in all sorts of information about why people made privacy decisions at that earlier time.
James Pita, University of Southern California (suggested reading: Deployed ARMOR Protection: The Application of a Game Theoretic Model for Security at the Los Angeles International Airport), studies security personnel who have to guard a physical location. In his analysis, there are limited resources—guards, cameras, etc.—and a set of locations that need to be guarded. An example would be the Los Angeles airport, where a finite number of K-9 units need to guard eight terminals. His model uses a Stackelberg game to minimize predictability (otherwise, the adversary will learn it and exploit it) while maximizing security. There are complications—observational uncertainty and bounded rationally on the part of the attackers—which he tried to capture in his model.
Markus Jakobsson, Palo Alto Research Center (suggested reading: Male, late with your credit card payment, and like to speed? You will be phished!; Social Phishing; Love and Authentication; Quantifying the Security of Preference-Based Authentication), pointed out that auto insurers ask people if they smoke in order to get a feeling for whether they engage in high-risk behaviors. In his experiment, he selected 100 people who were the victim of online fraud and 100 people who were not. He then asked them to complete a survey about different physical risks such as mountain climbing and parachute jumping, financial risks such as buying stocks and real estate, and Internet risks such as visiting porn sites and using public wi-fi networks. He found significant correlation between different risks, but I didn’t see an overall pattern emerge. And in the discussion phase, several people had questions about the data. More analysis, and probably more data, is required. To be fair, he was still in the middle of his analysis.
Rachel Greenstadt, Drexel University (suggested reading: Practical Attacks Against Authorship Recognition Techniques (pre-print); Reinterpreting the Disclosure Debate for Web Infections), discussed ways in which humans and machines can collaborate in making security decisions. These decisions are hard for several reasons: because they are context dependent, require specialized knowledge, are dynamic, and require complex risk analysis. And humans and machines are good at different sorts of tasks. Machine-style authentication: This guy I’m standing next to knows Jake’s private key, so he must be Jake. Human-style authentication: This guy I’m standing next to looks like Jake and sounds like Jake, so he must be Jake. The trick is to design systems that get the best of these two authentication styles and not the worst. She described two experiments examining two decisions: should I log into this website (the phishing problem), and should I publish this anonymous essay or will my linguistic style betray me?
Mike Roe, Microsoft, talked about crime in online games, particularly in Second Life and Metaplace. There are four classes of people on online games: explorers, socializers, achievers, and griefers. Griefers try to annoy socializers in social worlds like Second Life, or annoy achievers in competitive worlds like World of Warcraft. Crime is not necessarily economic; criminals trying to steal money is much less of a problem in these games than people just trying to be annoying. In the question session, Dave Clark said that griefers are a constant, but economic fraud grows over time. I responded that the two types of attackers are different people, with different personality profiles. I also pointed out that there is another kind of attacker: achievers who use illegal mechanisms to assist themselves.
In the discussion, Peter Neumann pointed out that safety is an emergent property, and requires security, reliability, and survivability. Others weren’t so sure.
Adam Shostack’s liveblogging is here. Ross Anderson’s liveblogging is in his blog post’s comments. Matt Blaze’s audio is here.
Conference dinner tonight at Legal Seafoods. And four more sessions tomorrow.
An Expectation of Online Privacy
If your data is online, it is not private. Oh, maybe it seems private. Certainly, only you have access to your e-mail. Well, you and your ISP. And the sender’s ISP. And any backbone provider who happens to route that mail from the sender to you. And, if you read your personal mail from work, your company. And, if they have taps at the correct points, the NSA and any other sufficiently well-funded government intelligence organization—domestic and international.
You could encrypt your mail, of course, but few of us do that. Most of us now use webmail. The general problem is that, for the most part, your online data is not under your control. Cloud computing and software as a service exacerbate this problem even more.
Your webmail is less under your control than it would be if you downloaded your mail to your computer. If you use Salesforce.com, you’re relying on that company to keep your data private. If you use Google Docs, you’re relying on Google. This is why the Electronic Privacy Information Center recently filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission: many of us are relying on Google’s security, but we don’t know what it is.
This is new. Twenty years ago, if someone wanted to look through your correspondence, he had to break into your house. Now, he can just break into your ISP. Ten years ago, your voicemail was on an answering machine in your office; now it’s on a computer owned by a telephone company. Your financial accounts are on remote websites protected only by passwords; your credit history is collected, stored, and sold by companies you don’t even know exist.
And more data is being generated. Lists of books you buy, as well as the books you look at, are stored in the computers of online booksellers. Your affinity card tells your supermarket what foods you like. What were cash transactions are now credit card transactions. What used to be an anonymous coin tossed into a toll booth is now an EZ Pass record of which highway you were on, and when. What used to be a face-to-face chat is now an e-mail, IM, or SMS conversation—or maybe a conversation inside Facebook.
Remember when Facebook recently changed its terms of service to take further control over your data? They can do that whenever they want, you know.
We have no choice but to trust these companies with our security and privacy, even though they have little incentive to protect them. Neither ChoicePoint, Lexis Nexis, Bank of America, nor T-Mobile bears the costs of privacy violations or any resultant identity theft.
This loss of control over our data has other effects, too. Our protections against police abuse have been severely watered down. The courts have ruled that the police can search your data without a warrant, as long as others hold that data. If the police want to read the e-mail on your computer, they need a warrant; but they don’t need one to read it from the backup tapes at your ISP.
This isn’t a technological problem; it’s a legal problem. The courts need to recognize that in the information age, virtual privacy and physical privacy don’t have the same boundaries. We should be able to control our own data, regardless of where it is stored. We should be able to make decisions about the security and privacy of that data, and have legal recourse should companies fail to honor those decisions. And just as the Supreme Court eventually ruled that tapping a telephone was a Fourth Amendment search, requiring a warrant—even though it occurred at the phone company switching office and not in the target’s home or office—the Supreme Court must recognize that reading personal e-mail at an ISP is no different.
This essay was originally published on the SearchSecurity.com website, as the second half of a point/counterpoint with Marcus Ranum.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.