Re: [arch-d] <draft-lazanski-consolidation-00>

[Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]>]

>     Il 12/11/2020 04:29 Christian Huitema <[e-mail]> ha scritto:
> 
> 
> 
>     On 11/11/2020 4:37 PM, Martin Thomson wrote:
> 

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>         > > 
> >             > > > 
> > >             I am more concerned about the loss of privacy that seems to be 
> > >             occurring at the application layer via extensive tracking of users and 
> > >             sharing of user information, rather than my perception of what is now 
> > >             occurring at the network layer.
> > > 
> > >         > > 
> >         A totally legitimate concern, but that line of argumentation sounds like whataboutism. Improvements in privacy with respect to the network do not drive privacy violations at the application layer.
> > 
> >     > 
>     What Martin says. The draft is supposedly about consolidation. There is definitely a relation between concentration and privacy: if traffic gets consolidated on a small number of big platforms, the owners of these platforms see a lot of data and metadata, which affects privacy. But the relation between that and end-to-end encryption is tenuous. For example, Google was getting just as many cookies before web pages started being sent over HTTPS. The differences is that before encryption other actors were also able to read these cookies. That was hardly a better privacy posture.
> 
I note one big risk to privacy that is generated by the introduction of end-to-end encryption, together with the IoT and cloudification trends: end-users - not just network administrators - lose the ability to scrutinize what their applications and devices actually send to their makers, or - in case of self-masquerading technologies like DoH - even to detect that a communication is happening and to block it if they want so. There was a talk about this at the IETF 105 plenary:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/105/materials/slides-105-ietf-sesse-lessons-from-privacy-measurement-arvind-narayanan-00

Indeed, one of the side effects of DoH for some (more technical) users is to disrupt their Pi-holes and other DNS-based tracker blockers.

Consolidation underpins all of this, as in the "surveillance capitalism" business model whoever has more opportunities to acquire information wins.

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Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
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