

What Can We Learn from Ashley Madison? - dredmorbius
http://www.onthemedia.org/story/what-can-we-learn-ashley-madison/transcript/

======
informatimago
Or rather:
[https://youtu.be/46h7oP9eiBk?t=149](https://youtu.be/46h7oP9eiBk?t=149)

------
dredmorbius
This is a piece by _On the Media 's_ Brooke Gladstone from _before_ the AM
database leak, June 24, intervewing Paul Ford (of "What is Code" fame).

There's audio if you prefer here: [http://www.onthemedia.org/story/what-can-
we-learn-ashley-mad...](http://www.onthemedia.org/story/what-can-we-learn-
ashley-madison/)

It's an intelligent piece and hits on many of the themes revealed since:

 _Brooke Gladstone: You wrote that at it 's heart, this problem with
protecting our data stems from, essentially, a conflict between the
centralized and decentralized Internet, and that we've always been at one end
or the other, swinging like a pendulum_

...

 _Paul Ford: See, I read this book in 2002 called Translucent Databases by a
guy named Peter Wayner. It 's a short book and it just describes an approach
to obscuring data inside of a data base so that it's still useful in some
ways. You might know the zip code but not know the street address and so on.
The user of the website, they might have full access to it. They can update
their name, they can change their address, whatever. They can make decisions
about how they want that information to be used as well, but what it really
does is scramble the eggs. It's an approach to just hiding and obscuring as
much by default as possible, adding lots of garbage and then hashing that all
together into a big mess._

 _B: So this idea has been around for a while but these big centralized sites
have not picked up on it, I assume because it runs counter to their desire to
market the information they 've assembled or to market to their customers._

...

 _PF: ...I 'm starting to wonder (if) maybe the best thing to do is erase my
own history, just get rid of it. Maybe that's the only way out for us right
now, just to start to travel a little bit lighter, throw stuff away, have less
digital footprint._

The key theme I'd like to add is this: _Data is Liability_.

Again and again, that's the message from data disclosures.

An exceptionally peculiar aspect of digital data is that, while it may remain
in the boxes and cages provided for it, it's got a notable tendency to find
itself liberated. Often without warning, and not detected for days, weeks,
months, or longer, afterward (as in this case). In the real world we've got
friction, especially associated with data processing and transfer. In digital
form, far less so. Sometimes friction is good.

See:

Steve Bellovin's "If it Doesn't Exist, it Can't be Abused"
[https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2014-11/2014-11-11.htm...](https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2014-11/2014-11-11.html)
(h/t Don Marti [http://zgp.org](http://zgp.org))

"Personal data is as hot as nuclear waste"
[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jan/15/data.secur...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jan/15/data.security)

Maciej Cegłowski's "The Internet With a Human Face"
[http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm](http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm)

