(not necessarily in response to Christian) On Sat, Apr 18, 2015 at 12:08 AM, Christian Huitema <[email protected]> wrote: > On Friday, April 17, 2015, at 9:14 AM, Dave Crocker wrote >> ... >> This translates into "privacy relates to controlling disclosure of >> information about a person or organization." Then add the >> scope-of-control portion. > > There is indeed some fuzziness in the definition of privacy. I like the > analysis in this Pew Research Center study on "Public Perceptions of Privacy > and Security in the Post-Snowden Era:" > http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/11/12/public-privacy-perceptions/. I think > they do a good job relating threats to privacy and threats to personal > security. To quote: "Beyond the frequency of individual words, when > responses are grouped into themes, the largest block of answers ties to > concepts of security, safety, and protection. For many others, notions of > secrecy and keeping things 'hidden' are top of mind when thinking about > privacy."
There is emerging academic work (not published yet, so I won't cite) that discusses privacy as what philosophers call an "essentially contested concept." The idea being that for some class of ideas and concepts -- art, justice, freedom, etc. -- there is no single definition and, instead, that the struggle around what they mean defines them. I realize that's some pretty non-technical and abstract thinking, but for many folks (like some of us here) that have been involved for decades in academic/industry/civil society kvetching on privacy and defining it, the realization that the lack of a definition may in itself define the thing is pretty important and profound. I was a postdoc under NYU professor Helen Nissenbaum a while back and at least in the academic privacy community, her notion of "contextual integrity" is perhaps the biggest "definitional" thinking we've seen in a decade or so. She has written a book on it, but I suggest anyone interested read the following shorter article that hits the high points: http://www.amacad.org/publications/daedalus/11_fall_nissenbaum.pdf best, Joe -- Joseph Lorenzo Hall Chief Technologist Center for Democracy & Technology 1634 I ST NW STE 1100 Washington DC 20006-4011 (p) 202-407-8825 (f) 202-637-0968 [email protected] PGP: https://josephhall.org/gpg-key fingerprint: 3CA2 8D7B 9F6D DBD3 4B10 1607 5F86 6987 40A9 A871 _______________________________________________ ietf-privacy mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-privacy
