How “Hashing” Controls Our Files And Does It Violate Our Privacy?How far do the limits of access and control of our personal data reach on Internet?
It is remarkable how the new communication systems detect and collect any new information we put into creating in this way our complete virtual identikit and how they manage and guess our "virtual behavior".
But does our information remains private and protected?
What is the “hash function”? In computer science, the values returned by a hash function are called hash values, hash codes, hash sums or simply hashes. Hash functions are primarily used to generate fixed-length output data that acts as a shortened reference to the original data. This is useful when the original data is too cumbersome to use in its entirety.
Here is an illustration published by Wikimedia Commons that demonstrates how it works:
In practice, this function translates each file as a combination of letters and numbers, which makes them unique and individual as individual are the fingerprints. The particularity of the hash function is that it can identify files but only if, like the fingerprints, there is already a record of the file to compare to. The hash function cannot tell which is the original file and which is the copy. It just can recognize if one file is exactly the same to another because of the matching algorithms.
Hash function is used almost everywhere - from profile identification to file protection, from allowing web services to check your password without actually finding out your original password to confirming that a file wasn’t somehow changed as it travelled from user to user.
Hashing is widespread in the movie studios and record companies practice who create their hash blacklists containing copyrighted files.
Hashing is widely deployed in the antivirus protection . There are malware hash value black lists with the viruses algorithms. So, when appears a virus the malware protection system detects the hash values or smaller and recognizable components of them.
Extremely important application of the hash function is the possibility to ensure the authenticity of messages and files. When transferring messages we can compare the hash algorithm before the transmission and after it and if they are identical we can be sure they have not been modified or tampered and that they kept the authentic form.
This brings us to the main legal problem.
Recently gained popularity the case in which the popular cloud storage Dropbox had blocked the transfer of user files on Tweeter after the signal for DMCA breach (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). This event generated a wave of negative reactions because of the violation of users privacy and Dropbox has been accused of breaching of its own privacy policy.
Is there actually violation of our privacy if our file is been blocked? When we upload a file using Dropbox two things happen to it: a hash is generated and the file gets encrypted against any unauthorized access. At the request of copyright holders the copyright protected files could be collected in so-called "black lists" . When we use and transfer a file the generated algorithm becomes visible and if it matches with a file algorithm from the hash black list it is being blocked although it is located in our personal internet space. In other words, the notification for a possible copyright infringement is not submitted by someone, in this case by a Dropbox employee, and there is no violation of our private profile by unauthorized access in order to find the protected file. Only when a file is shared from user to user or on the internet in general and the protection system detects a matching algorithm with one introduced in the hash based anti infringement lists this file is getting automatically blocked but it remains available in the users profile.
If the shared file is a modified version of the protected one the hash protection shouldn’t notice it like copyrights infringement.
In conclusion, one can consider that there is no privacy violation when one or more our files are blocked from sharing, due to the supposed possession of copyrighted content when hash protection comes into force.
Sabina Popova
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