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Designing for Privacy – An Emerging Software Pattern

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Re: Designing for Privacy – An Emerging Software Pattern

#11

Post by imglorp »

milstan wrote: post #8
imglorp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any instance of (a) a SaaS with a legally binding contract with some teeth around user privacy and (b) where that clause was exercised and the user benefited? The civil route be an alternative to regulatory solutions.

Regulation doesn't make the social change. Software does.

Ah, the third leg of the solutions stool: civil, government, and tech. I'd argue any culture will have a mix of all three.

For traffic accidents, there might be various applications of lawsuits, citations, and speed bumps in your town.

In the case of SaaS, we might have only one or two. For example, take LinkedIn last week, selling everyone's PII to ScribD. There might be legal issue in GDPR or CA jurisdictions. There's probably no civil one (?). There is certainly no tech one: you need your PII to be on LI so your friends can find you, because that's the value of LI. I suppose in there future there could be a tech solution here with agents representing you in the cloud, or maybe e2e homomorphic encryption, but it's surely not what drives LI's income at the moment.

Re: Designing for Privacy – An Emerging Software Pattern

#12

Post by motohagiography »

Privacy right now is still a super luxury product that hasn't trickled down generally to the aspirational goods market. I'm all for engineering privacy solutions, but reality is, these are designed to facilitate information sharing that was previous considered taboo or beyond the acceptable. You probably wouldn't trust a bunch of anonymous random grad students using university tech to keep your family's medical records safe, but with a privacy technology, suddenly giving them the data is viable - and this is what we call "privacy" now.

Privacy engineering is interesting, but not nearly as much as privacy products, as really without viable privacy products, privacy engineering is just another self-selected problem.

Re: Designing for Privacy – An Emerging Software Pattern

#13

Post by vukjanosevic »

motohagiography wrote: post #12

Privacy right now is still a super luxury product that hasn't trickled down generally to the aspirational goods market. I'm all for engineering privacy solutions, but reality is, these are designed to facilitate information sharing that was previous considered taboo or beyond the acceptable. You probably wouldn't trust a bunch of anonymous random grad students using university tech to keep your family's medical recor…

There are a number of viable data privacy software products out there. Companies, and engineers they employ, need to account for that and stop being ignorant

Re: Designing for Privacy – An Emerging Software Pattern

#14

Post by blakesterz »

ignoramous wrote: post #9
blakesterz wrote: post #4

I don't actually know if I read this quote somewhere or made it up somehow, but I've been using: "Privacy/Security is getting better but it's getting worse faster". There's soooo many people working hard on both security and privacy. They're trying their best to make products that are privacy focused and more secure. But they're up against Facebook, Google, etc... and the fact that many consumers just don't care. We…

> We say we care, but in the end, we don't. Others who care are fighting this fight. Facebook's message at the recent f8 was "privacy is the future"... It is not everyday you get giants like those, even superficially, to pay lip-service to something like that. > But they're up against Facebook, Google, etc. It isn't a losing battle, I don't think so. A lot of hardworking and smart people are putting in the effort, li…

> A lot of hardworking and smart people are putting in the effort, like you mentioned, but that effort isn't in vain. May be you're not paying enough attention to know the impact their work is having?

I'm paying close attention, it could be I'm just being pessimistic :-) This is certainly a case where I hope I am wrong.

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