This WSJ article reports on a new privacy issue with Facebook. It turns out that their application infrastructure allow those applications access to your personal information independent of your privacy settings. They are then able to (and have in many cases been shown to) share that information with third parties. The specific information shared is your Facebook user ID, and in some cases your friend’s user IDs.

Many of the most popular applications have been shown to be sharing this information, including FarmVille, Texas HoldEm Poker and FrontierVille among others.

Technology Firms Back Privacy Bill – WSJ.com

It looks like many technology companies recognize that the writing is on the wall and that some kind of consumer privacy legislation will come down the pipe at some point.

They are endorsing this one (with some suggested changes) because it adopts a self-regulatory program, rather than requiring specific actions.

It is a tricky balance. On the one hand self-regulation is notoriously ineffective and self serving. On the other hand, detailed regulation is almost always out dated before it is passed and does at least as much damage as good.

This NYTimes article discusses a bill which the Obama administration is proposing to submit to congress. The general background of the bill is that evolving technology has made it more difficult for law enforcement to conduct effective wiretaps and other intercepts because much of the targeted communication now takes place on the Internet and is often encrypted.

The actual text of the proposed bill does not appear to be available, but the article lists the following likely requirements.

1. Communications services that encrypt messages must have a way to unscramble them.
2. Foreign-based providers that do business inside the United States must install a domestic office capable of performing intercepts.
3. Developers of software that enables peer-to-peer communication must redesign their service to allow interception.

The first of these is similar to the CALEA law which requires telecommunications carriers to design their services to enable automated real time intercepts. While this generally sounds reasonable when “we” say it, the idea is more ominous when coming from some other governments.

The second of these feels uncomfortably familiar. See my past blog posts (and here)on the attempts of privacy hostile countries to require similar concessions from RIM.

The third proposal is completely outrageous. In effect it says that I may not speak in a way which is unintelligible to the wire tappers. As a colleague quipped “I am hiring Navajo code talkers.” This would require a back door be inserted in to cryptography tools. Experience shows that any crypto system with such a back door will be breached and then left vulnerable to the enormous number of criminal hackers on the Internet today.

In 1993 the US Government proposed a system called the “Clipper Chip” which would provide all encryption for personal computers, but to which the US Government would have back door access. This was a terrible idea then, it was widely ridiculed, and suffered a well justified death by 1996. This third proposal would be much worse. It is asking huge numbers of non-crypto experts to build back doors in to their systems. Frankly, the cryptography in most software is already badly broken in many cases. Something as subtle and complex as a secure and effective law enforcement back door would be far beyond their abilities and render currently poor security completely untrustworthy.

All this is not to mention the potential abuse by oppressive regimes, who will pounce on the capability to further crush dissent within their countries. Finally, it will be largely ineffective against serious threats. Very strong and easy to use cryptography is already available world wide, for free (GPG, ZPhone, TrueCrypt, etc.). This is a classic case of damaging the innocent while leaving the guilty and dangerous unaffected.

It seems to me that there is a pendulum swing to these things. Technology cuts both ways. Some times it favors the interceptor and some times it favors the communicator. In most ways the Internet has been a fantastic boon to law enforcement. Cloud computing, email hosts, social networking, open WiFi, and huge hard drive that encourage people to save everything all provide law enforcement with enormous amounts of information they could never have collected in the past.

It may not be shocking to anyone that there is no federal push to make that more difficult to access while pushing to enhance their ability to intercept encrypted communications.

All this is argument about a bill we have not seen yet. Let us hope that the furor that has swirled around it will cause it to be retraced or modified significantly before it is actually delivered to congress.

Thanks to David Brin for linking to this article in reason.com about the debate over arresting people for recording active duty police officers. In general the specific law being broken is about making audio recordings without the concent of all parties.

As a privacy advocate, I find this situation puts me in an uncomfortable situation. On the one hand there is concern about the privacy interests of the police officers. On the other hand, this is one of the only ways of demonstrating police abuse or other bad actions. It also acts to balance the playing field where the police are already routinely recording most interactions through the use of dashboard cameras.

The origin of the term surveilance is the latin from sur- “over” + veiller “to watch,”. It implies that surveillance is about being watched by those in power (above).

Sousveillance is a term that has been coined recently to describe participant recording, or recording from “below”. That feels like a very different thing that should be fine as long as it is not hidden. Especially in circumstances where there is not a clear expectation of privacy.

I guess my solution to the conundrum would be to state that there should be no expectation of privacy on the part of authorities from recording when they are exercising those authorities. The citizens being interacted with would have a possible privacy expectation with respect to recording third parties however.

I am very interested in feedback and other thoughts on this one.

There has been a lot of excitement in the privacy community around the introduction of a social location service by Facebook. Having blown the dust off my test account, I don’t really understand all the fuss.

It appears that this capability only applies to mobile devices right now (although I have blogged in the past about the ability to locate your computer). When using the mobile site, or the FaceBook app, there is a button that allows you to “Check In” at your current location. It appears that this is exclusively an overt act, and that nothing is taking place passively in the background.

The privacy defaults (at least for me) were fairly restrictive. My check-in is only shared with “friends” by default. The only really interesting setting was that it defaults to show your location to others who are checked-in at the same location around the same time, but that was easily changed.

The FAQ talks about and links to the privacy settings in a prominent way. It feels strange to say this, but I don’t think they have done a bad thing here. Obviously there are major privacy and security implications to telling people where you are all the time, and it may lead to stalking and/or home robberies, but you really have to ask them to do it to you. Caveat emptor.

Of course, none of this should suggest that I have any intention of ever using the service myself.

I note that most of the other social location players, like Gowalla, Yelp, Booyah and Foursquare were at the announcement. This could certainly impact them in a big way, either for good or ill. That seems like the real story, and my thoughts on that are well out of scope for this blog.