Visualizing Privacy: Understanding and Protecting Your Information

1. Visualizing Privacy I March 7, 2006

2. Outline • Visualizing privacy • Three examples of visualizing privacy (from readings) • Privacy policy and privacy preference • Privacy Notice in Spyware applications • Third party tracking cookies • Your turn

3. Motivating Quote “privacy is the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others” (Westin, 1967)

4. Motivation • Privacy is abstract and hard to articulate unless one sees it • The potential harms to privacy are uncertain and faraway • Some privacy invasive technologies are hidden • Informed Consent model, if not informed, there is not meaningful consent

5. Motivation Example 2 Benjamine Brunk, Understanding Privacy Space

6. What is visualizing privacy? • Visualize is “to make visible: asto see or form a mental image of” (Merriam-Webster's collegiate dictionary) • Visualizing privacy is to make privacy visible, to make users form a mental image of privacy.

7. Privacy Space Framework • Awareness • Detection • Prevention • Response • Recovery Brunk, Figure 20-2 p. 414

8. Chapter 22 Privacy Policies and Privacy Preferences Lorrie Faith Cranor

9. Privacy Policies and preferences • Privacy Policies is a mechanism for communicating about information collection and use • Few people read privacy policies • Time consuming to read and difficult to understand • Format not standardized • Can change unexpectedly

10. P3P and P3P user agents • What: machine readable privacy policy in XML format. • How does it work? • website encode their privacy policies in P3P format • User agents read the policy and parse it out • Benefit: Offers an easy way for web sites to communicate about their privacy policies in a standard machine-readable format • Privacy is visualized in the following ways: • Summarize privacy policies • Compare policies with user preferences • Alert and advise users

11. P3P in IE6 Automatic processing of compact policies only; third-party cookies without compact policies blocked by default Privacy icon on status bar indicates that a cookie has been blocked – pop-up appears the first time the privacy icon appears

12. Users can click on privacy icon forlist of cookies; privacy summariesare available atsites that are P3P-enabled

13. Privacy summary report isgenerated automaticallyfrom full P3P policy

14. P3P in Netscape 7 Preview version similar to IE6, focusing, on cookies; cookies without compact policies (both first-party and third-party) are “flagged” rather than blocked by default Indicates flagged cookie

15. Privacy Bird • Free download of beta from http://privacybird.com/ • Origninally developed at AT&T Labs • Released as open source • “Browser helper object” for IE6 • Reads P3P policies at all P3P-enabled sites automatically • Bird icon at top of browser window indicates whether site matches user’s privacy preferences • Clicking on bird icon gives more information

16. Chirping bird is privacy indicator

17. Red bird indicates mismatch

19. Discussion • Can you think of anything else?

20. Chapter 23 Privacy Analysis for the Casual User Through Bugnosis David Martin

21. Web bugs • Invisible elements on a web page used to record the fact the face was visited, and sometimes to communicate additional information about the user or computer doing the viewing

22. Bugnosis • A IE plug-in that watches for web bugs • Alerts the user of its presence, but do not block web bugs

23. A demo • www.about.com • www.nytimes.com • www.doubleclick.com • http://freedownloadscenter.com/Utilities/

28. Stopping Spyware at the Gate Nathaniel Good, Rachna Dhamija, Jens Grossklags, et al.

29. User Study • Goal: How the form and content of notices affect users’ decision to install Spyware

30. Study Design • 31 participants • Ask the user to go through five programs: Google toolbar, Edonkey, KaZaA, WeatherScope, WebShots). • And install them if they feel appropriate

31. Notice Condition 1: EULA only

32. Notice Condition 2: Microsoft SP2 Warning + EULA

33. Notice Condition 3: Customized Short Notice + EULA

34. Study Results • Participants ignore EULAs • Although they know they were agreeing to a contract • Limited understanding of the content and little desire to read length notice • Additional Notice had only marginal effect on the total number of installations • Improved Notice is not enough to inform user

37. Your turn

38. Group problems • EULA – a failed way to inform, what are some of the ways we can better inform the user when they install these software?

39. Backup Slides These slides are from Lorrie’s previous class presentation on Privacy

40. Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) • Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) http://www.w3.org/p3p/ • Final P3P1.0 Recommendation issued 16 April 2002 • Offers an easy way for web sites to communicate about their privacy policies in a standard machine-readable format • Can be deployed using existing web servers • Enables the development of tools (built into browsers or separate applications) that • Summarize privacy policies • Compare policies with user preferences • Alert and advise users

41. Basic components • P3P provides a standard XML format that web sites use to encode their privacy policies • Sites also provide XML “policy reference files” to indicate which policy applies to which part of the site • Sites can optionally provide a “compact policy” by configuring their servers to issue a special P3P header when cookies are set • No special server software required • User software to read P3P policies called a “P3P user agent”

42. What’s in a P3P policy? • Name and contact information for site • The kind of access provided • Mechanisms for resolving privacy disputes • The kinds of data collected • How collected data is used, and whether individuals can opt-in or opt-out of any of these uses • Whether/when data may be shared and whether there is opt-in or opt-out • Data retention policy

43. GET /index.html HTTP/1.1 Host: www.att.com . . . Request web page HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: text/html . . . Send web page A simple HTTP transaction WebServer

44. GET /w3c/p3p.xml HTTP/1.1 Host: www.att.com Request Policy Reference File Send Policy Reference File Request P3P Policy Send P3P Policy GET /index.html HTTP/1.1 Host: www.att.com . . . Request web page HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: text/html . . . Send web page … with P3P 1.0 added WebServer

45. P3P increases transparency • P3P clients can check a privacy policy each time it changes • P3P clients can check privacy policies on all objects in a web page, including ads and invisible images http://www.att.com/accessatt/ http://adforce.imgis.com/?adlink|2|68523|1|146|ADFORCE

46. P3P in IE6 Automatic processing of compact policies only; third-party cookies without compact policies blocked by default Privacy icon on status bar indicates that a cookie has been blocked – pop-up appears the first time the privacy icon appears

47. Users can click on privacy icon forlist of cookies; privacy summariesare available atsites that are P3P-enabled

48. Privacy summary report isgenerated automaticallyfrom full P3P policy

49. P3P in Netscape 7 Preview version similar to IE6, focusing, on cookies; cookies without compact policies (both first-party and third-party) are “flagged” rather than blocked by default Indicates flagged cookie

50. Privacy Bird • Free download of beta from http://privacybird.com/ • Origninally developed at AT&T Labs • Released as open source • “Browser helper object” for IE6 • Reads P3P policies at all P3P-enabled sites automatically • Bird icon at top of browser window indicates whether site matches user’s privacy preferences • Clicking on bird icon gives more information