Comments on: On The Value of Personal and Corporate Privacy

By: Robin Wilton

Robin Wilton — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 14:14:03 +0000

Here’s another ‘cut’ at privacy, courtesy of some Summits I’ve been holding, and with a nod of gratitude to Piotr Cofta of BT: privacy is about maintaining the contextual integrity of the information you disclose.

With respect to Dan Davies Brackett, would you tell a complete stranger (or, for that matter, your boss) everything you tell your life partner or your child?

I don’t think ’shame or personal advantage’ covers all the bases. You have relationships in which disclosure of one set of true information is appropriate, and other relationships which are based on the disclosure of other information.

The idea of privacy as ‘contextual integrity’ is about two things: first, disclosing only as much information as is appropriate to a given relationship, and second, being able to control the ‘porosity’ of the barriers between those relationships.

For example – I tell an online retailer some things, and an online local authority other things. Without any notion of ’shame or personal advantage’, I should be able to control the extent to which my personal information is shared between them…

(PS – sorry it’s taken me a while to post this comment! ;^)

By: More on the Privacy-Portability conundrum « Vendorprisey

More on the Privacy-Portability conundrum « Vendorprisey — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:23:53 +0000

[...] quote, from Michelle Dennedy, Sun’s Chief Privacy Officer, courtesy of one of the mighty governor’s excellent [...]

By: Dan Davies Brackett

Dan Davies Brackett — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 16:35:14 +0000

Danno’s comment is tautological, I think. If I’m not materially or immaterially affected by a person or corporation discovering something about me, I don’t care about it — because the only reason I care about things is when I’m materially or immaterially affected by them.

Privacy is about keeping secrets. There are two reasons I keep secrets: shame and personal advantage. In the former case, there are things that I have done, or thought, or thought about doing, or that have happened to me, that I would prefer hadn’t been done/been thought/happened — so I want them edited out of reality. I want nobody to know what happened, so that I can essentially undo the action as far as the zeitgeist is concerned.

The latter is that there is some information that I have that has material value — be it stock knowledge, or a trade secret, or my buying habits — that I do not want to share because I either want to keep the advantage that knowing that information conveys or because there are people/corporations that could use the information that I don’t want to help.

The latter case is why I disable cookies and don’t give identifying information to companies when I can avoid it; I want advertising companies to fail, because I don’t like being manipulated.

By: Danno

Danno — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 04:59:34 +0000

The only way that I’m concerned about privacy is that I’m not negatively affected by it, materially or otherwise.

Otherwise, I could probably care less whether somebody figures out what kind of porn I like.

By: tech decentral » How to Get People to Think Cool Thoughts–Or Any Thoughts at All–About Sun

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 04:23:23 +0000

[...] I’m at Sun’s Analyst Summit in San Francisco along with Steve, Cote’, and James. Sun seems to have done a great job of turning themselves around–witness their “solidly profitable quarter“–but they still don’t get the kind of respect their technical achievements probably should deliver to them. [...]