
Designing for Privacy – An Emerging Software Pattern - milstan
https://medium.com/@milstan/designing-for-privacy-an-emerging-software-pattern-7c632cb1de35
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blakesterz
I don't actually know if I read this quote somewhere or made it up somehow,
but I've been using:

"Privacy/Security is getting better but it's getting worse faster".

There's soooo many people working hard on both security and privacy. They're
trying their best to make products that are privacy focused and more secure.
But they're up against Facebook, Google, etc... and the fact that many
consumers just don't care. We say we care, but in the end, we don't.

*I guess the quote is paraphrased from a Renner book?

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ignoramous
> _We say we care, but in the end, we don 't._

Others who care are fighting this fight. Facebook's message at the recent f8
was "privacy is the future"... It is not everyday you get giants like those,
even superficially, to pay lip-service to something like that.

> _But they 're up against Facebook, Google, etc._

It isn't a losing battle, I don't think so. A lot of hardworking and smart
people are putting in the effort, like you mentioned, but that effort isn't in
vain. May be you're not paying enough attention to know the impact their work
is having?

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blakesterz
> A lot of hardworking and smart people are putting in the effort, like you
> mentioned, but that effort isn't in vain. May be you're not paying enough
> attention to know the impact their work is having?

I'm paying close attention, it could be I'm just being pessimistic :-) This is
certainly a case where I hope I am wrong.

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motohagiography
Privacy right now is still a super luxury product that hasn't trickled down
generally to the aspirational goods market. I'm all for engineering privacy
solutions, but reality is, these are designed to facilitate information
sharing that was previous considered taboo or beyond the acceptable. You
probably wouldn't trust a bunch of anonymous random grad students using
university tech to keep your family's medical records safe, but with a privacy
technology, suddenly giving them the data is viable - and this is what we call
"privacy" now.

Privacy engineering is interesting, but not nearly as much as privacy
products, as really without viable privacy products, privacy engineering is
just another self-selected problem.

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vukjanosevic
There are a number of viable data privacy software products out there.
Companies, and engineers they employ, need to account for that and stop being
ignorant

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mikece
I’m curious if security consciousness has been raised to the point where
people are willing to pay for the iron-clad guarantee that their information
will never be sold... and if it’s enough to support privacy-first apps and
startups.

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imglorp
Is there any instance of (a) a SaaS with a legally binding contract with some
teeth around user privacy and (b) where that clause was exercised and the user
benefited?

The civil route be an alternative to regulatory solutions.

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milstan
Regulation doesn't make the social change. Software does.

~~~
imglorp
Ah, the third leg of the solutions stool: civil, government, and tech. I'd
argue any culture will have a mix of all three.

For traffic accidents, there might be various applications of lawsuits,
citations, and speed bumps in your town.

In the case of SaaS, we might have only one or two. For example, take LinkedIn
last week, selling everyone's PII to ScribD. There might be legal issue in
GDPR or CA jurisdictions. There's probably no civil one (?). There is
certainly no tech one: you need your PII to be on LI so your friends can find
you, because that's the value of LI. I suppose in there future there could be
a tech solution here with agents representing you in the cloud, or maybe e2e
homomorphic encryption, but it's surely not what drives LI's income at the
moment.

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TimSchumann
Did anyone else immediately guffaw at the pairing of article title and domain,
or am I just an oddball?

