Revocable Privacy: Principles, Use Cases, and Technologies

Security and privacy often seem to be at odds with one another. In this paper, we revisit the design principle of revocable privacy which guides the creation of systems that offer anonymity for people who do not violate a predefined rule, but can still have consequences for people who do violate the rule. We first improve the definition of revocable privacy by considering different types of sensors for users’ actions and different types of consequences of violating the rules (for example blocking). Second, we explore some use cases that can benefit from a revocable privacy approach. For each of these, we derive the underlying abstract rule that users should follow. Finally, we describe existing techniques that can implement some of these abstract rules. These descriptions not only illustrate what can already be accomplished using revocable privacy, they also reveal directions for future research.