Integrating privacy and good policy choices into product development from the beginning
Herman Yau & Andrew Gruen
Durin is an identity and access company, bringing the standards and best practices of the digital access experiences into the embodied world of homes and physical spaces.
Trust is central to build access control to your home... so what actions can the business take to show not tell it prioritizes users' privacy and building trust?
Latch’s privacy policy is only moderately reassuring. ... But hacks and data leaks happen all the time. ... How much trust do I owe a company ...
Principally, we want to put the customer in control wherever possible, particularly where there are meaningful tradeoffs between values.
Encryption itself presents users with a series of tradeoffs, which is why it's not our highest principle... but that doesn't mean it's unimportant.
Encryption in transit and at rest are always required, and E2EE, with our users holding the keys, is always the goal... but sometimes user choice takes precedence.
E2EE guarantees... or connection to other "smart home" systems?
Great for customer choice—there’s no better way to ensure customer choice than to make sure they physically control their data—but does anyone know or care?
What do we process, and how do we think about this systematically?
Data categorization and minimization
Creating clear categories of data that exist helps to determine if they should be collected
Developing categories helps to make data minimization easier; rather than trying to make decisions about every individual data point possible, we can rely on the categories as guides.
When we register a new user what individual pieces of data do we collect, where do we store them, and what processing do we do with them?
- Profile photos
- Faceprints
- Encryption keys
Delete means delete, not de-link... Unless doing so reduces privacy or is in direct, documentable conflict with a higher principle
Durin is about putting the user in control of their own home—which is not the same as giving them the opportunity to create a dragnet that captures and permanently stores information about every human who walks by.