Re: privacy digital rights management

[John S. Denker]

I wrote:
  Perhaps we are using
  wildly divergent notions of privacy 

Donald Eastlake 3rd wrote:

 You are confusing privacy with secrecy 

That's not a helpful remark.  My first contribution to
this thread called attention to the possibility of
wildly divergent notions of privacy.

Also please note that according to the US Office of
Technology Assessment, such terms do not posess a single
clear definition, and theorists argue variously ... the
same, completely distinct, or in some cases overlapping.

Please let's avoid adversarial wrangling over terminology.
If there is an important conceptual distinction, please
explain the concepts using unambiguous multi-word descriptions
so that we may have a collegial discussion.

 The spectrum from 2 people knowing something to 2 billion knowing
 something is pretty smooth and continuous. 

That is quite true, but quite irrelevant to the point I was making.
Pick an intermediate number, say 100 people.  Distributing
knowledge to a group of 100 people who share a vested interest in not 
divulging it outside the group is starkly different from distributing 
it to 100 people who have nothing to lose and something to gain by
divulging it.

Rights Management isn't even directly connected to knowledge.  Suppose
I know by heart the lyrics and music to _The Producers_ --- that doesn't 
mean I'm free to rent a hall and put on a performance.

 Both DRM and privacy have to
 do with controlling material after you have released it to someone who
 might wish to pass it on further against your wishes. There is little
 *tehcnical* difference between your doctors records being passed on to
 assorted insurance companies, your boss, and/or tabloid newspapers and
 the latest Disney movies being passed on from a country where it has
 been released to people/theaters in a country where it has not been
 released.

That's partly true (although overstated).  In any case it supports
my point that fixating on the *technical* issues misses some
crucial aspects of the problem.

 The only case where all holders of information always have a common
 interest is where the number of holder is one.

Colorful language is no substitute for a logical argument.
Exaggerated remarks (... ALWAYS have ...) tend to drive the
discussion away from reasonable paths.  In the real world,
there is a great deal of information held by N people where
(N1) and (Ninfinity).

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Re: privacy digital rights management

[RL 'Bob' Morgan]

On Wed, 26 Jun 2002, Donald Eastlake 3rd wrote:

 Privacy, according to the usual definitions, involve controlling the
 spread of information by persons autorized to have it. Contrast with
 secrecy which primarily has to do with stopping the spread of
 information through the actions of those not authorized to have it.

  We have thousands of years of experience with military crypto, where
  the parties at both ends of the conversation are highly motivated to
  restrict the flow of private information.  The current state of this
  technology is very robust.

 That's secrecy technology, not privacy technology.

I have seen private and secret defined in exactly the opposite fashion
as regards keys:  a private key is private because you never ever share
it with anyone, whereas a secret (symmetric) key is a secret because
you've told someone else and you expect them to not share it (in the sense
of can you keep a secret?).

Clearly there's not a common understanding of these simple words.  Seems
to me that Dan's mini-rant was referring to privacy in the sense you
define it above (controlling spread of info already held by others).

 - RL Bob



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