Alec Muffett writes: > To a first approximation I am in favour of maximising all of those, but > practically I feel that that's a foolhardy proposition - simply, my Netflix > viewing, or whatever, does not need to be anonymised.
I appreciate your approach to analyzing what Tor-like tools need to be able to do, but I wanted to question this a little bit. Some of us privacy advocates have felt that it's quite bad that communications technologies generate location and association metadata in the first place. I've often said in interviews that it's a flaw in the cell phone infrastructure that it generates location data about its users, for example, and that it would be better to have a mobile communications infrastructure where location anonymity was the default for everybody all of the time. In the Netflix case, when you use an account to sign into their service, just like any other, you're creating evidence of where you were when you were watching that movie, which is also the basis of other evidence about who was with you or who knows whom (like if you watched Netflix from someone else's house, or two people watched Netflix from the same place, or one person watched Netflix and another person signed into a different service). I wouldn't want to concede that it's appropriate that all of that data gets generated all of the time, even if you can't see any sensitivity to it at a particular moment. And if location privacy continues to happen on a purely opt-in basis, it'll continue to draw more attention to people who are using tools to protect it, and it'll continue to be hard for people to anticipate when they're going to turn out to have needed it. It seems that people often discover later on that they wish they had taken precautions to protect some data that didn't seem significant at the moment. -- Seth Schoen <sch...@eff.org> Senior Staff Technologist https://www.eff.org/ Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/join 815 Eddy Street, San Francisco, CA 94109 +1 415 436 9333 x107 -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk@lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk