Several Ways to Understand Digital Privacy Peter Eckersley

Several Ways to Understand Digital Privacy Peter Eckersley, Senior Staff Technologist Electronic Frontier Foundation 1

Data Privacy is a complicated concept. It can be sliced several ways. 2

1. What data? What we read and think Where we go, when we go there Who we talk to, what we say to them What we buy Implicitly: our sexuality, politics and religion It's data: it can be queried and processed in bulk 3

2. Privacy against whom? Corporations? Advertisers? Our employers? Our friends? Parents? Partners? Law enforcement? Our government? A foreign government? Lawyers? Divorce lawyers? Curious hackers? Identity thieves? The Russian mafia? Stalkers who work for data brokers? 4

3. Privacy to what end? Protection against bad laws Protection against the lack of good laws Protection against authoritarian governments Protection against social intolerance Giving us safe space to grow up in Protecting us against crime Protection against creepy or hostile individuals 5

As you can see No one technology is going to get us privacy (But here are three you should know about) 6

1. HTTPS Necessary for protecting the Web against: eavesdropping, account hijacking, identity theft, espionage Frequently: not deployed, or not deployed correctly 7

EFF's work on HTTPS - Encouraging & assisting deployment - HTTPS Everywhere for Firefox - Making sure it's secure: The SSL Observatory, deployment advice 8

2. Do-Not-Track A proposal for a simple “do not track me” signal from your browser to web servers A policy fix for a technical problem Protects people's reading habits and other online activities from being monitored by 3 rd parties Only stops law-abiding trackers (but good for spotting the others) 9

3. Tor Prevents the network from seeing who you're talking to Especially useful for dissidents in authoritarian regimes Doesn't protect you against your email provider Currently too laggy for continual use Should be used with HTTPS 10