[Bigbang-dev] security and privacy-mentions at the IETF

[Corinne Cath]

Hi all,

Just chipping in re: qualitative findings. I found that a lot of people
that I interviewed mentioned they were "card-carrying EFF" members. Some of
these folks work for companies whose products ostensibly run against what
most people would call "privacy enhancing tech".

So - when discussing this (cognitive dissonance) with Amelia, she mentioned
her findings regarding privacy on Saturday. I like Nick's explanation, but
mine is a little different. I hypothesized that people email more on
Saturdays because its the weekend, and hence folks will feel more liberated
to focus on issues that are outside (or counter to) the remit of their
jobs.

Now - of course, I did not focus on this in my interviews hence to
substantiate I would have to go back and do more research. But it is an
interesting addition to AA's findings and Nick's suggestion.

On a separate note, I wonder if we should problematize the notion of
"volunteer contribution". I am always confused by what it consists of.
Like, people who go to the IETF call themselves volunteers, but are you
really when you are paid to go there and sent with a specific mandate? What
power dynamics does this label perpetuate and obfuscate, and how are we
part of that dynamic if we take it on?

Anyways, just my .2

Kind regards,

Corinne

On Mon, Feb 18, 2019 at 11:14 AM Amelia Andersdotter <amelia at article19.org>
wrote:

> On 2019-02-18 01:01, Nick Doty wrote:
> > +1, this is really interesting, Amelia! I’m not sure, but I think this
> > was an email message stuck in a backlog, so we may be replying several
> > months late. Be sure that that isn’t because of a lack of activity on
> > the project or interest in this use case.
> >
> > I especially like the method of using counts for the word “the” as a
> > kind of normalization. On another thread, Seb had suggested that we
> > normalize by the number of messages sent (which I think is also
> > useful) but using a baseline word like that could potentially do a
> > better job at handling the situation where long and short messages
> > could be very different. Do you know if there is published literature
> > on using this technique?
> >
> Using "the" had two disadvantages:
>
> - I ended up with very small numbers, so I couldn't actually do useful
> computations before multiplying them by 1000 (the floating numbers were
> too small and defaulted to 0 for some GARCH models)
>
> - My variances were not completely random afterwards either, but rather
> deterministically increasing. This appears to suggest that the measure
> #mentions privacy/security simply gets more volatile over time, in a way
> which is independent of the simultaneous increases of the word "the".
>
> Tbh, I did not find a lot of material on time-series where volatility
> strictly increases over time - normally the idea of making all the
> transformations (moving average, normalization, filtering, etc) is
> exactly to get rid of such effects.
>
> > And I also think the periodicity testing is interesting, and I like
> > the finding that maybe privacy advocates are more willing to work on
> > the weekends. That might actually be an interesting way to identify
> > volunteer participation. My impression is that grad students,
> > advocates, people participating as unpaid volunteers are more likely
> > to send emails on nights and weekends than those who participate in
> > Internet governance as a formal part of their job.
> >
> Corinne had very interesting qualitative feedback when I told her these
> results relating to her interviews with people. Maybe she would share?
>
> best regards,
>
> Amelia
> > Cheers,
> > Nick
> >
> >> On Feb 12, 2019, at 7:42 AM, Sebastian Benthall <sbenthall at gmail.com
> >> <mailto:sbenthall at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >>
> >> Thanks for sharing!
> >>
> >> Would you be able to share any background on the project you are
> >> working on?
> >>
> >> Any feedback on the tools that would make them more helpful?
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Seb
> >>
> >> On Tue, Feb 12, 2019, 5:07 AM Amelia Andersdotter
> >> <amelia at article19.org <mailto:amelia at article19.org> wrote:
> >>
> >>     dear all,
> >>
> >>     perhaps of interest to some on the list. i was particularly amused
> by
> >>     figure 6 and 7.
> >>
> >>     best,
> >>
> >>     a
> >>
> >>     --
> >>     Amelia Andersdotter
> >>     Technical Consultant, Digital Programme
> >>
> >>     ARTICLE19
> >>     www.article19.org <http://www.article19.org/>
> >>
> >>     PGP: 3D5D B6CA B852 B988 055A 6A6F FEF1 C294 B4E8 0B55
> >>
> >
>
> --
> Amelia Andersdotter
> Technical Consultant, Digital Programme
>
> ARTICLE19
> www.article19.org
>
> PGP: 3D5D B6CA B852 B988 055A 6A6F FEF1 C294 B4E8 0B55
>
>
>
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-- 
Corinne Cath - Speth
Ph.D. Candidate, Oxford Internet Institute & Alan Turing Institute

Web: www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/corinne-cath
Email: ccath at turing.ac.uk & corinnecath at gmail.com
Twitter: @C_Cath
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