Privacy, Confidentiality, and Security
Context: FIT1043_MOC · the protection concerns of data governance · three distinct ideas often confused · links to datafication
Quick Revision
- 🎯 Objective: separate three protection concepts ➔ privacy (control of self), confidentiality (info about you), security (protecting the data).
- 📦 Core Components: privacy | confidentiality | security | implicit vs explicit data.
- ⚡ Key Constraint: implicit data — facts inferred from your data (not given) — is the sneaky threat to confidentiality (pregnancy from purchases, traits from “likes”).
📝 How It Works
1. The Three Concepts
- Privacy ➔ having control over how one shares oneself with others (e.g. closing the blinds in your living room).
- Confidentiality ➔ information privacy — how information about an individual is treated/shared (e.g. excluding others from your search/browse history).
- Security ➔ the protection of data, preventing improper use (e.g. stopping hackers stealing credit-card data).
2. Implicit vs Explicit Data
- Explicit data ➔ information a consumer actively provides (name, gender, email, home address — e.g. at signup).
- Implicit data ➔ not explicitly stored but inferred with reasonable precision from available data.
3. Loss of Confidentiality (social media)
- Prediction ➔ retailers predicting pregnancy from purchases; many traits inferred from Facebook “likes” (“curly fry conundrum”).
- Consumer control ➔ often you must accept a data-sharing policy or can’t fully use a service; ideally an agent asks “share your health data with company X?“.
⚖️ Core Decision Matrix
| Term | Protects | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Privacy | control of self-disclosure | closing the blinds |
| Confidentiality | information about you | hiding browse history |
| Security | the data itself | blocking a hacker |
When It Flips: the three chain together — security failures (a breach) expose confidential information, which erodes privacy; and implicit inference can breach confidentiality even with no explicit data leaked.
🧠 Active Recall
Distinguish privacy, confidentiality, and security with an example of each.
Answer
- Short answer: Privacy = control over how you share yourself (closing the blinds); confidentiality = how information about you is treated/shared (hiding browse history); security = protecting the data from improper use (blocking a hacker).
- Why: Self / info / data ➔ privacy is about you, confidentiality about information on you, security about the stored data.
What is implicit data, and why does it threaten confidentiality?
Answer
- Short answer: Implicit data is inferred (not explicitly provided) from available data with reasonable precision — e.g. predicting pregnancy from purchases or traits from “likes”.
- Why: Inference, not disclosure ➔ sensitive facts can be derived without you ever sharing them, bypassing explicit consent.