[Ndn-interest] NDN protocol principles: no privacy?

[Burke, Jeff]

Mark,


>Hi Gene,
>Absolutely - I don't think there's a three- or ten-word "definition" 
>that I've seen. but I do think it would be a valuable principle - in the 
>sense of a high-level goal or fundamental basis for evaluating 
>alternatives. RFC 6973 takes a nice approach, for example, by offering 
>definitions of some technical properties and mechanisms, but not trying 
>to formulate an overall definition of "privacy". 

So I can try to understand your point here - do you agree with the authors that the primary privacy concerns are those of individuals?  (Or, more generally, are corporations people here for this discussion - a more generic "data owner"?) 

>The editors there say 
>that the body of the document, the discussion of the tradeoffs and 
>alternatives, is the best way they could come up with to approach that 
>abstraction. in practical terms, as you know well I think there's been 
>an over-reliance on opportunistic caching in ICN generally, and as a 
>result observability and correlation are defined to be positive 
>properties of ICN communication rather than harmful ones.


Would I be correct to parse your concerns into two pieces that may have different implications:

- Confidentiality of request (e.g., the consumer side)
- Confidentiality of publication (e.g., the publisher side) 

>
>I think I understand your beauty-pageant analogy - but I don't agree 
>that it applies. It would have been different (to me, anyway) if there 
>had been a 'principle', even it had been vague or anodyne. I really felt 
>that it was worth commenting when there was no statement whatsoever - 
>that felt like a real gap (again, to me).

(See my other email - would be helpful to get some strawman ideas on what this might look like.) 

>
>most of these six "principles" sounded like "mechanisms" to me - the 
>list felt like the end of a discussion about alternatives and the best 
>ways to implement an architecture, rather than the start of one. it 
>sounded like "we're tired of questions about LPM in the PIT, so we're 
>going to stop calling that a possible mechanism and start calling it an 
>inevitable, immutable, unquestionable 'principle'".

Well, to take LPM for an example - it's actually not mentioned in the principle doc that Alex sent. The principle I suspect that you are referring to is: 

      [5] In-Network Name Discovery: Interests should be able use incomplete names to retrieve data packets.
      A consumer may not know the complete network-level name for data, as some parts of the name cannot be guessed, computed, or inferred beforehand. Once initial data is received, naming conventions can help determine complete names of other related data:
      
        
* majority of interests will carry complete names
        
* in-network name discovery expected to be used to bootstrap communication)
      


Can you explain your objection in these terms? 

Thanks,
Jeff



>
>Thanks,
>Mark
>
>On 3/12/16 5:30 PM, GTS wrote:
>> Hi Mark,
>>
>> I'm a huge fan of privacy and a lot of my research privacy-related.
>> But, I can't define "privacy". I wonder if anyone can do it precisely
>> and succinctly?
>> Might be because it's an amorphous and fluid notion.
>>
>> Perhaps if NDN folks were to include *privacy* as one of their guiding
>> principles,
>> it'd be like a stereotypical beauty pageant contestant who,
>> when asked about her (or his?) ideals, comes up with something
>> like: "Peace on Earth"?
>> :-)
>>
>> On a less serious note, whenever I see things like codified "principles"
>> (a notion similar to "commandments"), I can't help but think of a new
>> ideology
>> or a new cult being started.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Gene
>>
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