The Privicons project continues to gain momentum. In case you're not yet familiar with it, here's a quick primer.
Email and other text-based communication suffers from the problem that it's too easy to copy. How often have you been burned by someone carelessly forwarding your private email comments? Or perhaps you've been the one who forwarded, without realizing that the sender felt the issues in the message were too sensitive?
The Privicons project aims to help senders tell recipients what they can and can't do with their original text, through clear, instantly-recognizable icons. Or, as the project website puts it:
Clothing manufacturers have long used icons to represent how clothing should be washed. ... [We] recommend our "washing instructions for email" approach to the long-standing privacy issue of email carelessness.
...
Privicons relies on social norms and signals meant to be acknowledged by a message's recipient, instead of technical enforcement mechanisms.
There are some interesting ideas here. Not the least of which is that DRM-based privacy enforcement schemes don't work, because they're too easy to work around. Here's what senders who use the icons are saying:
- [>] -- Please share: Feel free to share the email content with anyone of your choosing.
- [X] -- Keep private: Don't reveal anything about the email, including information about sender or content.
- [-] -- Don't attribute: You may share the email content, but keep the author anonymous.
- [=] -- Delete after reading: Make like a Mission: Impossible tape.
- [=X] -- Delete after X days: As above, but you've a little more time.
- [/] -- Don't print: the email sender doesn't want to risk the content being left at a public printer
- [o] -- Keep internal: think carefully about to whom you forward;
As well as the ASCII icons shown above, there are more detailed icons available, for email clients that can show them. There's also a Chrome extension to add the icons to Gmail.
The IETF Network Working Group is also sponsoring a draft standardization of privicons. The RFC is currently at Draft 3.
Richi Jennings is an independent analyst, specializing in blogging, email, spam, security, and other technology topics. His writing has won American Society of Business Publication Editors and Jesse H. Neal awards. You can encircle him at +richi, follow him as @richi on Twitter, pretend to be his friend at Facebook.com/richij or just use boring old email: io@richij.com.
