Deb's Blog

See! I was supposed to use a word for fraud which starts with P (so, to go well with the other article titles). I did maintain all the constraints - but I cheated blatantly with the word that I used, exploiting the power of human cognition. Cannot similar things be done with privacy icons, to imply something that is not? Hell yeah, the possibility is endless. So what to do when we encounter such cases, or the browser does? We notify the user about the issue, right? A classical preload-notice is cliché - USERS WON'T READ but press "OK, Proceed..." and even if they understand that there's a privacy-concern about this site, they will not have a clear idea (without reading the warning very carefully) exactly what it was about. Some other notification method may also come to your mind, came to mine one too - but none of them were 0% annoying, except for one . Elements are painted-red if a fraud is detected with its corresponding p...

Only two of the four shell-leaks we have put, are widely discussed and are supposed to cause pain in our - erm... forehead, namingly the #2 (partner/barter) and #4 (feds/govt.). But the other two, albeit not too many of us cared about it, but are also equally concerning. It's not necessary to have only one leak though; sites are most likely to (and will) have multiple leaks or all at once (may very well have none, too). The design that we have made up can very well handle (any of) these kind of situations - visually at least. But, is that all? No. Let again take a look at the numbering-scheme of the leaks - they are all in powers of 2 ( 2^[0-3] ). Thus, no matter how you make combinations taking any of them - the sum of the combination-indexes can be represented as a single hexadecimal digit (ranging from 2^0-1=0x0 i.e. no-leak to 2^4-1=0xF i.e all-leaks ). Hence, it's effectively similar to the octal notation of file-system-permissions to determine the type of lea...

The privacy as it may sound, might not have same context for every purpose or scenario, not even for the same person. Your social networking self and collaborative self wouldn't have similar concerns about the privacy. Even on social networking platforms, you do treat your Facebook and Twitter differently, don't you? (Don't just say 'no' to prove me wrong - we are under a situation here!) Moderated P : This represents that you will be asked to put your information, some of which are mandatory but all of which is scope-adjustable. You can set your ' circle-of-trust ' to whom you want to expose which of your data ( just me, friends, friends-of-friends, everyone or some other representation). Your choice to hide the details you don't want to reveal, will be respected. The Open P : In this case, you don't have any permission to change the scope of the information that you upload. Your data ' may be ' accessible throughout the w...

Persistence in the sense, how long your data stays in the website's server. The implementation of it should be simple enough to understand from the visual-feedbacks (and having a chance to not have to babble a lot, I'd just present you with the icons). Momentary 7 days to 1 month 1 to 3 months 3 months to 1 year Infinite Persistence Although I'm not happy with the Momentary Persistence logo, I know somebody will come up with a better way to represent it. Next step is to visualize how can we handle the private-data.