MIT 6.805/STS085: Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier
in coordination with
Harvard Law School: Internet and Society
Fall Semester, 1999

Week 9, Nov. 1 - 5:
Privacy and anonymity

Overview

Controversies over cryptography, digital identity, and anonymity all reflect deep concerns about the the threats to privacy in a world of ubiquitous networked communications. Indeed, much of the discussion of network privacy focuses on the use of cryptography to secure the confidentiality of communications and the risks of "data theft" from networked computers.

A more insidious challenge to personal privacy, however, arises from "legitimate" access to information. The growth of telecommunications, the ever-increasing numbers of databases, the collection of information for commercial use, and the ease with which information can be generated and collected means that extensive information on people's personal habits and social interactions has become visible to anyone who cares to look. Aggregating and correlating this information can often reveal intimate details about private lives, just as surely as any unauthorized interception of electronic communications.

The US has only narrow laws governing the collection and use of personal information. With the exception of certain hot-button areas, such as credit card numbers, medical records, and protection of children, few people in the US seem to worry about this issue. In fact, industry is enthusiastically exploring the potential for personalized advertising generated technologies such as data mining and web tracking. Lately, however, there is growing worry in industry that public concerns about privacy may prove to be an obstacle to the growth of electronic commerce.

The World Wide Web Consortium has proposed a Web standard called the Platform for Privacy Protection (P3P) that would use web-page tags and browser rules (similar to PICS) so as to automatically warn people when they visit sites with inadequate privacy policies.

On Thursday, we'll turn to issues of anonymity and anonymous remailers.

Readings for Tuesday (be prepared to discuss these in class):

• Susan Stellin, Privacy in the Digital Age, Part 1: Who's watching you online?, and Part 2: How private is your personal information? This is a good overview piece, published by CNET in May-June 1966.
• An overview of Fair Information Practices.

• World Wide Web Consortium, The Platform for Privacy Preferences. This is the Web Consortium's official site for P3P. Skim it and look at some of the links. In particular, see P3P Guiding Principles

Tuesday class, Nov. 1: Privacy

Readings for Thursday (be prepared to discuss these in class):

• David Mazières and M. Frans Kaashoek. The design, implementation and operation of an email pseudonym server (PDF format, postscript format), in Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (1998). This paper describes experience at the MIT Lab for Computer Science with a service that permits people to send email without revealing their identity.
• Mcintyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, 514 U.S. 334 (1995). This Supreme Court decision may be critical to the legal status of anonymity on the Internet. In it, the Court affirms the right to conduct anonymous political leafletting.
• American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia v. Miller (N.D. Ga. June 20, 1997) In this decision, the a federal court in Atlanta granted the ACLU of Georgia's motion for a preliminary injunction, voiding a Georgia statute that criminalized anonymous on-line communications.

Thursday class, Nov. 1: Anonymity

• Guest: David Mazières

Writing assignment: No writing assignment for this week.

• The assignment originally scheduled for November 9 has been canceled.

Additional resources for this topic

General sources on privacy

• We can snoop you! Click here to see a brief demo illustrating the information that web servers can routinely obtain as soon as a browser references a page on the server.

• One of the most extensive collections of privacy resources on the net is the Privacy Archive of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). In particular, see the EPIC report Surfer Beware: Personal Privacy and the Internet, June 1997, and its sequel Surfer Beware II: Notice Is Not Enough, June 1998. Also very useful is the EPIC Online Guide to Privacy Resources.

• For information on international privacy issues, see the Web site for Privacy International, which is hosted by EPIC.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Privacy, Security, Crypto, and Surveillance Archive is a useful collection of source material and pointers to other resources.

• Rob Kling, Mark S. Ackerman, and Jonathan P. Allen, "Information entrepreneuralism, information technologies and the continuing vulnerability of privacy" from Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices, 2nd Ed: Rob Kling (Ed). Academic Press, 1995. The authors argue that economic factors alone do not explain the growth of technologies that erode personal privacy, and they point instead to the rise of "information entrepreneuralism" and managerial strategies that rely on intensive data-analysis techniques.

• Joshua B. Sessler, Computer Cookie Control: Transaction Generated Information and Privacy Regulation on the Internet, Journal of Law and Policy, 5 J.L. & Pol'y 627, 1997. (Get from Lexis: link works at MIT only)

• Glen Roberts's Stalker's home page is in a class by itself. Don't miss it. Particularly intersting is the exhibit of social security numbers of the richest people in America, assembled from information (notably SEC reports) posted on the Web by the US government.

Privacy of medical records

• National Research Council, For the Record: Protecting Electronic Health Information, March 1997 Report. This is a comprehensive study of the requirements for privacy of electronic medical records. You can skim the report on-line. Contact Hal Abelson to borrow a printed copy. Executive summary

Regulation and self-regulation

• U.S. Department of Commerce, Elements of Effective Self-Regulation for Protection of Privacy Staff discussion draft paper on privacy self-regulation, January 1998.

• The US Federal Trade Commission stakes out a much more pro-regulatory position than does the Commerce Department. See their Privacy Online: A Report to Congress, June 1998 (HTML and PDF formats). For a summary, read Consumer Privacy on the World Wide Web -- prepared statement of the Federal Trade Commission before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade and Consumer Protection of the House Committee on Commerce United States House of Representatives, Washington, D.C. July 21, 1998. Here is a summary of the summary: FTC Wants More Regulatory Authority to Police Internet Privacy Tech Law Journal, July 22, 1998.

• TRUSTe home page TRUSTe is an independent, non-profit, privacy initiative "dedicated to building users' trust and confidence on the Internet". The paper TRUSTe VS. The Elements of Effective Self-Regulation, gives TRUSTe's view of the relation between their approach and the guidelines set out by the Commerce Department.

• Online Privacy Alliance, Effective enforcement of self regulation. The Online Privacy Alliance is an industry organization formed to support self-regulation for privacy protection. See the Online Privacy Alliance Home Page.

• The Center for Democracy and Technology is a public interest group dealing with privacy issues on the internet. The July 21, 1998, Testimony of Deirdre Mulligan, Staff Counsel, Center for Democracy and Technology before the House Committee on Commerce Subcommittee Telecommunications, Trade, and Consumer Protection, make the case that self-regulation on its own is unlikely to provide meaningful privacy protection.

• E-Commerce & Privacy: What Net Users Want, Executive Summary, June 1998. This summarizes a Harris poll conducted on attitudes of Americans towards privacy on the net. According to Harris, the result is that Americans would prefer self-regulation if it could work, but they do not think that business incentives will be sufficient to result in good privacy practices.

European Data Directive

• Here are two short pieces describing the possible implications of the European data directive:

  • Simon Davies, Europe to U.S.: No privacy, no trade.Wired magazine Wired Magazine, May 1998.
  • David Banisar, The privacy threat to electronic commerce, Communications Week International, June 1, 1998.

• Here is the actual Directive:

  • Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data

Privacy technology

• The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P), sponsored by the World Wide Web Consortium is a labelling scheme that permits web site operators and users to express and control their privacy practices in an interoperable way. It uses an infrastructure similar to PICS.

• Lucent Technologies, The Lucent Personalized Web Assistant Check out the features for privacy and the target-revokable e-mail addresses system for helping to minimize spam. There are also good references on anonymizers, web tracking, and general privacy issues.

• Ian Goldberg David Wagner Eric Brewer, Privacy-enhancing technologies for the Internet University of California, Berkeley, 1997.

• Lorrie Cantor and Joseph Reagle, Designing a Social Protocol: Lessons Learned from the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project, Proceedings of the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference. Alexandria, VA, September 27-29 1997, revised April 1998.

Anonymity

• A. Michael Froomkin, Flood Control on the Information Ocean: Living with Anonymity, Digital Cash, and Distributed Data Bases, U. Pittsburgh J. of Law and Commerce, vol. 15, no. 395 (1996). This article analyzes the legal status of attempts to ban anonymity, and discusses the larger context of anonymity and privacy.

• American Association for the Advancement of Science, Anonymous Communication on the Internet, a AAAS project to explore on-line anonymity and pseudonymity.

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Last modified: November 3 1999, 6:37 PM