Information Flow: a flow of bits from sender to receiver with some probability.
Privacy VS. Transparency
- Leaky information flow: aka. privacy violation.
- Inefficient information flow
It is important to recognize the context. Contextualized integrity/privacy frames the line of privacy into various situations. E.g. home images on Google map, various information flows on top of that might cause a lot of issues, even if it is public information in the first place.
Privacy is a proper information flow.
Helen Nissenbaum (Creator of Contextual Integrity - Cornell)
Challenges
Maximizing privacy might lead to transparency issues (e.g. money laundering or buying products without reading any reviews).
Q: How should we balance the information flow to minimize transparency dilemma (insufficient information) and privacy dilemma(too much information)?
A: To build a Pareto frontier.
Data is Fire
Data can be useful and dangerous because of duo use.
If you don’t have anything to hide right now, why do you care if someone is inferring: Changes in life make anything privacy. Implications, correlations and powerful machine learning models can figure out a lot about one’s privacy.
Removing PII might not work because of the existence of implicit patterns and information (cross-referencing, pattern recognition).