Outreach Volunteers Needed - Content Control is a Dead End

[Jaap-Henk Hoepman]

On Sat, 1 Sep 2001 17:55:35 +0200  Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org> writes:
> Later in your message you mentioned the need for
> 
> Dan Geer writes:
> > containers that encapsulate content,
> 
> in order to enforce control of information.
> 
> On the technological side, privacy-protecting technologies include
> remailers, proxies, e-mail encryption, file encryption, stream/session
> encryption, steganography, and so on.  Copyright-protecting
> technologies so far mainly include watermarks and DRM (and you might
> want to include spiders which try to find illict copies).  But it's
> silly to think that PGP is like Adobe eBook Reader, even though both
> of them try to use technological measures to enforce somebody's policy
> about how certain information ought to be used.

Privacy not only is the ability to keep things to yourself (confidential) but
also the right/power to control how information about yourself is being used
after you give it to someone else. The privacy-protecting technolgies Seth
mentions only achieve confidentiality. I tend to agree with Dan that, in order
to achieve `remote control' over private information, you probably need the 
same techniques that can also be used to implement digital rights management.
So if DRM is impossible, so is protecting our privacy.

Jaap-Henk

[Moderator's note: I strongly disagree. You don't need to control the
spread of information about yourself if you avoid ever leaking that
information in the first place, which can be done with technologies
like digital cash, remailers, onion routers etc. --Perry]


-- 
Jaap-Henk Hoepman             | Come sail your ships around me
Dept. of Computer Science     | And burn your bridges down
University of Twente          |       Nick Cave - "Ship Song"
Email: hoepman at cs.utwente.nl === WWW: www.cs.utwente.nl/~hoepman
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