NIST Privacy Framework | Hacker News Reader

NIST Privacy Framework

nist.gov

115 pointssacrosanct44 comments

From their site: "The NIST Privacy Framework is a voluntary tool developed in collaboration with stakeholders intended to help organizations identify and manage privacy risk to build innovative products and services while protecting individuals’ privacy."

What is a voluntary tool? Beats me. Who are the stakeholders? Beats me. Help organizations to manage risk. What kind of risk? Whose privacy? yadda yadda yadda.. Run on sentence. My take away: NIST needs to hire writers.

I suspect this is a result of too many writers!

Maybe it was written by ChatGPT!

Just a Bueracrat. Same thing.

If you were there when we were writing that copy back in 2005, you could have schooled us in how not to write like a LLM that hadn't been invented yet.

Also, the copy you're referring to was written by a contractor, not "a bureaucrat."

Maybe they don't want you to know those things.

"Voluntary tool" means other federal agencies are not required to adopt it. "Developed in collaboration with stakeholders" means this was not 100% internally developed at NIST.

The rest of your questions are answered in the FAQ.

It's not a run-on sentence; it's just a long one, and if you're looking for a way to ensure your users' privacy while building a computer-oriented service, that executive summary tells you enough to decide whether this is something you want to further investigate. Drive-by web forum commentators, in general, are not considered target audience for these documents.

With NIST frameworks, one needs to explore a bit. Here are some of the stakeholders:

https://www.nist.gov/privacy-framework/request-comment

And here is the PDF that should answer all of the other questions you have:

https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/CSWP/NIST.CSWP.01162020.pd...

Excellent links, thank you!

I can imagine the benefit of having this as a reference, instead of needing to have meetings across departments and levels to negotiate who's responsible for what, in an open-ended way.

Thanks to NIST for providing a Schelling point for appropriate coordination to uphold privacy, and a scaffold of reasonable good, reasonably thorough thinking about how to appropriately handle privacy, and the general roles of everyone involved in a coherent effort inside or outside an enterprise. Raising the water line!

A voluntary tool is a tool you don't need to use.

NIST is a government organization, and it helps to explain that this is a tool provided by government for your discretionary use; it is not a regulatory framework.

It's okay, you're not the target audience. People who are already know the answers to these questions.

If I may attempt to offer a translation:

> The NIST Privacy Framework is a voluntary tool

This is something that organizations can choose to use. We are a standards body, not a regulatory agency.

> developed in collaboration with stakeholders

We actually talked to people who need and use standards of this sort. We integrated their feedback.

> intended to help organizations identify and manage privacy risk

The goal is to help organizations understand the chances they are taking with private data.

> build innovative products and services while protecting individuals’ privacy

While still being able to actually make use of the data to accomplish goals that matter in some way.

----

Basically, this is completely comprehensible to most people and organizations who expect to be making use of this sort of standard. Like any technical document, it has a specialized vocabulary. It is not written for, and should not be judged by, the prose expectations of the general population.

NIST has writers. They are technical writers who are writing technical documentation intended for technical readers. We should calibrate our expectations accordingly.

I agree full stop. Would like to know background of parent poster just to understand his motivation for criticizing.

Was he writing with negative approach just because he can or he just failed to get the meaning between the lines because he is not the target audience?

At a guess, not the target audience combined with a failure to recognize it as a technical document. The latter is completely understandable. NIST uses words that can be found in daily business use, but they take on technical meanings.

The translation reads a lot better for technical and non technical folks. NIST technical writers should take a look at this.

I disagree. It's a overly wordy and imprecise read for the kind of person who is the target audience (which is what "technical" means here). Further, this sort of translation only works on this particular snippet because it's an introduction and statement of purpose. The policy details would not translate nearly so well or coherently.

You may as well request that IETF RFCs be rendered into lay language. You can do it, but it would likely make them much less useful as specifications.

This one is in the tl;dr HN uninformed expert Hall of Fame. Did you click even one level down? NIST is a standards organization whose usually very careful work is to provide frameworks for people to make products, make business decisions, and create entire industries. It's not a single Github repo you can clone or a blog post can can dissect. The companies, researchers, and organizations that will use this framework understand it and will I am sure be able to use it and suggest areas of improvement.

It doesn't take a genius to understand what a voluntary tool/framework is. Like many of the NIST frameworks including the well known cyber security framework, these aren't mandated by NIST to be used.

But that organisations globally can use the framework in uplifting or driving improved measures around privacy.

If you go to the NIST website and read it, you will have all of your questions clearly answered.

Does anyone really still trust these guys after the revelations of the last decade? Seems to me they had their fingers in a lot of pies.

Can you point to some specific complaints of wrongdoing?

NIST generally doesn’t have any “power” that they can abuse - unless you consider any standards organization an abuse of sovereignty or some such

It's not exactly recent, but Dual_EC_DRGB wasn't handled well.

(pdf) https://harvardnsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Vol13Iss2_...

No, that wasn't handled well and it damaged them. The NSA were the ones who backdoored it though, and NIST ignored warnings of a possible back door.

However, in general NIST standards are very good.

Which was rescended…so I’m not sure what the complaint is

This is about as good as it gets for any organization

This is from 2020

Regulatory capture sausage in the making?

NIST doesn’t make any regulations, it’s a standards and metrology agency. Is there something specific in this framework that you think benefits big tech (or some other parties) but is not in the best interest of the public?

FedRAMP, StateRAMP, and CMMC are entirely based on NIST Standards. If you want to do business with the federal, state or local government you will need to comply with these regulations (Soon, these programs are being rolled out)

Edit: Granted, OP obviously has no idea what they're talking about. They are very forward thinking methods for ensuring a zero trust network, communications and data exchange. They include very explicit controls and requirements for maintaining data security.

I know we don't have much choice but is this really safe?

The recent pentagon papers are nothing if not impressive of how deeply US intelligence is in just about every conversation that matters.

So can we trust NIST? As far as I know there have been concerns in the past that they have played ball and so have private security firms.

That said maybe a US backdoor is better than all round shoddy engineering?

I imagine something like this would be a great way to slip in a weak link.

This is a policy framework, not an encryption algorithm.

What 'choice' exactly are you being denied?

Alternative sources of advice that isn't confirmed to work with NSA to spy on people.

You do understand this is a non-obligatory guidance document, right? You can continue to not read nor understand it and no one will be any the wiser. The NSA will almost certainly not put you on a blacklist someplace (no promises and all that). Then you can google "privacy framework" to find a wealth of other non-obligatory guidance documents more to your liking (most of which will reference a NIST document or two someplace, so be careful).

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