The Spy in the Coffee Machine: The End of Privacy as We Know It by Kieron O'Hara & Nigel Shadbolt

Author:Kieron O'Hara & Nigel Shadbolt [O'Hara, Kieron & Shadbolt, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Computers, Information Technology, Non-Fiction, Privacy, Social Aspects, Social Issues
ISBN: 9781780747347
Google: BPe7DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2014-09-30T23:00:00+00:00

T HE POLICY-AWARE W EB

The potential of the Semantic Web is very high. Of course, privacy laws will continue to operate, and privacy activists will remain properly vigilant. But the technologists themselves are also responding, and, as with privacy enhancing technologies, those with the remit to oversee the Web are trying to ensure that privacy protection is written into the technological foundations, below ground level as it were; the specification of the various layers of protocols that make up the Semantic Web explicitly includes a layer allowing the development of trusted connections between users. After all, if the network effects that are essential to the continuing development of the Web are to be realised, then it is essential that users are confident that their data or information will not be misused. 152

As with digital technologies generally, it is important to make it possible for people or organisations to express their privacy policies understandably – ideally, in the case of the Semantic Web, machine-readably. It has to be borne in mind that the Web is a chaotic and decentralised place, with many different standards, languages, formalisms and purposes. A centralised approach will not work, so what might seem like the obvious idea of creating a system for registering and policing privacy policies that everyone would have to use to get on the Semantic Web is a non-starter. The Web thrives on decentralisation and the lack of constraints. Furthermore – to state the obvious – the Web is big, and any system that is intended to work at the scale of the Web needs to avoid the centralisation that tends to create bottlenecks in large-scale information structures.

Thinkers at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) hope to use the information-processing possibilities of the Semantic Web itself to allow systems to express and act on privacy preferences. Because the Semantic Web facilitates richer interactions with information, it should be possible to use those capabilities to express complex privacy policies, and for systems to reason about them. It should be possible to use Semantic Web formalisms to do the reasoning required to prevent the Semantic Web from invading everyone’s privacy.

Daniel Weitzner and colleagues of the W3C call this the policy-aware Web, 153 which needs to meet three requirements. First, it needs to be transparent, so that both people and machines can discover and interpret the social constraints under which a resource wishes to operate. So the owner of a piece of information ought to be able to say that he wishes to sell it, but doesn’t want it passed onto others. Similarly a buyer should be able to purchase the information on the express condition that he doesn’t resell.

The second requirement of the policy-aware Web is that it must contain simple compliance mechanisms, so that all this privacy policy stuff goes on without most users knowing anything about it. The Web is the enormous social phenomenon it is because most users don’t know anything about HTTP or HTML or SPARQL or whatever, and the policy-aware Web should continue that tradition – one has the right to be ignorant of what is under the bonnet.

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