Privacy

This was my response to Lance Fornow's privacy blog:
http://weblog.fortnow.com/2006/08/privacy.html
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As a cryptographer, I should be outraged by this post. And, to some extent, I am :). But I have to admit that I personally also take very little effort to ensure my privacy.

What I think is important, is not whether one is personally paranoid about its own privacy, but whether one CAN be paranoid if one chooses to. I live in Manhattan, and I have to admit that I am very far from exploring all the exciting things that happen here everyday :). Still, the few times I do, and the fact that I always CAN if I choose to, makes me extremely happy to live in the City. I think the same thing is true about privacy. I think it's your choice how private you want your life to be. But one should have options.

Of course, the above thing is not very deep, but it does have an implication. If one is using mainstream services like Gmail, Yahoo!Mail, Amazon, EBay, etc., their default privacy policy should be acceptable and not to invasive from the privacy perspective. Because if it's not, and I want to be paranoid, I am severely limiting my choices in terms of popular services which have little variety on the web. Thus, even if we currently do not care about own own privacy, the fact that someday we may want to care, or some people we want to interact with already care, means that we MUST be outraged by obvious violations of privacy.

Additionally, when you said you don't care about privacy, I think you really meant you don't care about a PASSIVE observer who just records what are doing. I am sure, however, the moment the passive observer turns into an active attacker, your attitude would change. Spamming is a perfect example. I don't care if people know my email. In fact, I want them to. But I don't want to be bombarded with spam. Thus, we all take elementary precautions like using a spam-filter and non publishing our email in clear text. So even the most boring of us actually care and at least somewhat enforce privacy, without perhaps explicitly admitting it :).

To sum up, I am with Lance regarding my personal "non-private" lifestyle, but I think not worrying about privacy --- because one currently (thinks that one) doesn't enforce it,--- is too big of a leap, which I am not willing to make.

Finally, as a researcher in cryptography, working on privacy-related problems is pretty exciting from a technical perspective. So, even I never get to use it, it's too much fun to give it up :).

PS. As a proof of my lack of privacy, the above blog by itself should easily reveal my identity :).