(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


The Fallacy of “Privacy vs: [Children’s] Safety”: why Privacy always wins over any singular concern, and why deployment of #EndToEndEncryption is essentially a binary choice, explained for #NoPlaceToH

2022-01-20 22:41:37+00:00

The #NoPlaceToHide campaign has, as-ever, flushed out a lot of argument like this:

We don’t believe that this is a binary issue: privacy vs children’s safety.



We believe it’s possible to have both, and that we all need to work together to implement an effective solution that protects both privacy and children. #NoPlaceToHide

Visit: https://t.co/KEdemrFnV3 pic.twitter.com/g03gLOKMMK — The Marie Collins Foundation (@MCFcharityUK) January 20, 2022 https://twitter.com/MCFcharityUK/status/1484191619595210754

This is pretty easily explained and dismissed; but first, a quick digression.

Metcalfe’s Law (and its nitpicks)

There’s a famous law of communications that the ‘value’ (whatever that means) of a ‘network’ increases as the square of the number of participants; this is Metcalfe’s Law, and it’s a rough and ready (if arguable and nitpicked) metric to express something intuitive about networking.

Most typically: if you have a social network with only 10 people on it, then the ‘value’ is 10-squared, or 100, as that’s the maximum number of direct communications relationships that the network can provide; however a network of 250 people can have 250-squared relationships, or 62,500, which is A LOT BIGGER than 100.

And a network of 1 million people has a value of one trillion, which is immensely bigger; and lo! — a social network containing 1 million people overall tends to be a lot more valuable to its participants — with more purpose and information — than a network containing only 10 people.

you know that google can do maths for you, right?

Okay, but what does this have to do with Children’s Safety and Privacy?

Basically, if we accept that there’s any meaning at all to Metcalfe’s Law, it means that we are content to measure the value of networks two-dimensionally — the square — which yields the number of relationships that it can hold.

However, there’s a third dimension which I have already mentioned — purpose — and that makes matters even more interesting for comparing relative values.

With Metcalfe’s law we assume and ignore that we are measuring the value of a general purpose network, but actually if we factor purpose into our maths — if we stop treating “purpose” as a continuum — then we get:

network value = square(participants) x (number of purposes to which the network can be put by users)

For a trivial example: when we consider “children’s safety” we are considering this revised Metcalfe’s Law by a large amount; for a network with 100 participants, of whom 33 are kids, and if we consider the kids safety to be 1 purpose, then the value is measured:

100 (overall participants) x 33 (kids) x 1 (safety) = 3,300

…but the network value as a whole is probably better measured as something like:

100 (participants) x 100 (participants) x 100 (purposes) = 1,000,000

…because there are hundreds, if not thousands of purposes to which a network can be put: sharing with friends, selling cars, charity collections, gig reviews, party invitations, etc; and as such we can see that (like it or not) the value of the network as a whole vastly outranks the restricted case of online safety for the subset of kids.

And the figure of 33% kids is not accidental — child safety advocates tend to quote numbers of one-fifth to one-third of internet users as being children:

search: “nspcc” “users are children”

Summary

So there you have it — to rephrase the challenge: “there is no such singular thing as ‘privacy’ to compare to ‘child safety’“ — because what you are weighing the relatively small set of one-or-a-few “child safety” requirements against is a never-ending list of purposes to which a network can be put:

securely sending bank details

organising a surprise birthday party

sharing a cancer diagnosis

looking for love

exploring your sexuality and gender

escaping an abusive partner

booking travel tickets

having an extra-marital affair

organising an anti-government protest

seeking abortion advice

doubting your faith

and many, many, more, including some which are terrible…

“Privacy” is a feature or quality that is innate to each and all of these purposes — rather than a thing in and of itself — and this is why the hydra-headed use-case that is “privacy” will always be more important than any singular, or small tranche, of circumscribed use-cases of any kind whatsoever, irrespective of how we feel about the matter.

Because the value of the purpose-space of a network is N-cubed, and any constraint on one-or-more dimension of that will massively diminish the value of the network.

And why is it effectively a binary issue? Because if the scores are 1,000,000 vs: 3,300 — or whatever — then the bigger number wins. And the number for ‘privacy’ will always be bigger, massively.
[END]

[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/15940
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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