Privacy is not Access Control (But then what is it?)

In my previous article on the Google Buzz fiasco, I pointed out that the privacy problems were exacerbated by the fact that the user interface was created by programmers. In this post I will elaborate on that theme and provide some constructive advice on privacy-conscious design, especially for social networking.

The problem I’m addressing is that as far as computer scientists and computer programmers are concerned, privacy is a question of access control, i.e., who is allowed to look at what. Unfortunately, in the real world, that is only a tiny part of what privacy is about. Here are three examples to make my point:

1. Dummy cameras. Consider a thought experiment: suppose the government installed a bunch of cameras all over a public park along with prominent signs announcing 24×7 surveillance. The catch, however, is that the cameras have not been turned on. Has anyone’s privacy been violated?

From the computer science perspective, the answer is no, because no one is actually being observed, nothing is being recorded and no data is being generated. But common sense tells us that something is wrong with that answer. The cameras cause people considerable discomfort. The surveillance, real or imaginary, changes their behavior.

This hypothetical scenario is adapted from Ryan Calo’s paper, which analyzes in detail the “sensation of being observed.”

2. Aggregation changes the equation. Remember the uproar when Facebook released News Feed? No new information was revealed to your friends that wasn’t accessible to them before; it was just that the News Feed made it dramatically easier to observe all your activities on the site.

Of course, it goes both ways: the technology in turn changed people’s expectations; it is now hard to imagine not having a feed-like system, whether on Facebook or another social network. Nevertheless, I often see people putting something into their profile, deciding a few moments later that they didn’t want to share it after all, and realizing that it was too late because the information has already been broadcast to their friends.

3. Everyone-but-X access control, which I described in an earlier article, shows in a direct way how access control fails to capture privacy requirements. From the traditional CS security perspective, the ability for a user to make something visible to “everyone but X” is meaningless: X can always create a fake account to get around it.

But a use-case should hopefully immediately convince you that everyone-but-X is a good idea: your sibling is on your friends list and you want to post about your sex life. It’s not that you want to prevent X from having access to your post, but rather that both of you prefer that X didn’t have access to it.

Access control is not the goal of privacy design. It is at best one of many tools. Rather, human behavior is key. The dummy cameras were bad because they affected the behavior of people in a detrimental way. News feed was bad because it introduced major new privacy consequences for the behaviors that people were accustomed to on the site. (However, I would argue that the dramatic increase in usefulness trumped the privacy drawbacks.) Everyone-but-X privacy is good because it allows people to carry over to the online setting behaviors that they are used to in the real world.

It is impossible to fully analyze the privacy consequences of a design decision without studying its impact on actual user behavior. There is no theoretical framework to ensure that a design decision is safe — user testing is essential. Going back to Google Buzz, a beta period or a more gradually phased roll-out would have undoubtedly been better.

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