Some thoughts on Usability of Privacy Technologies - George Danezis

Some thoughts on Usability of Privacy Technologies (Outline of Talk) | Conspicuous Chatter: "one may assume that the key customers of this software — large enterprises and governments — simply never asked for such features, and in fact probably considered such a feature to conflict with other requirements (such as the need to recover mail of employees, backup, …).

 These commercial pressures, have changed in the past few years, as large internet companies start relying heavily on serving end-users (search, webmail, social networking). Sadly, these companies have adopted both a business model — ad-based monetization — and a technical architecture — cloud computing — that makes meaningful privacy protection very difficult. In turn the “success” of those architectures has lead to an extreme ease of developing using this model, and an increasing difficulty in providing end-user solutions with appropriate privacy protections — let alone usable ones.

 The rise of services has pushed a number of key privacy technologies into not being commercially supported and a key feature, and in effect at best a “common” — with the governance and funding problems this entails. We have recently learned about the systemic under funding of key privacy technologies such as OpenSSL and GPG. Technologies like Tor are mostly funded for their national firewall traversal features, seeing development on anonymity features suffer.

Unlike other commons (health, parks, quality assurance in medicines), the state has not stepped in to either help with governance or with funding — all the opposite. For example, standardization efforts have systematically promoted “surveillance by design” instead of best of breed privacy protection; funding for surveillance technology is enormous compared to funding for privacy technologies, and somehow ironically, a number of calls for funding of privacy technologies are in the context of making surveillance more “privacy friendly” — leading to largely non-nonsensical outcomes." 'via Blog this'