[liberationtech] On Privacy, Trending Today

[Marc Sunet]

It's a good one, here is a related one that talks about the social effects:

https://www.socialcooling.com/

To me, part of the problem is that online communications are constantly
creating a permanent record, like Snowden puts it. This list, for
example, should really be regarded as private, a conversation with the
liberation folks. But it's actually public by virtue of having an
eternal record of everything said here made available on a discoverable
part the Web. Any joke, criticism or statement can then be taken out of
context and copy-pasted somewhere else; in the worst case, this results
in a public lynching of the author. The lack of privacy then leads to a
chilling effect, to self-censorship; every word must be carefully
measured, even the email address you send this from and other metadata
must be considered.

On the other hand, if the mailing list record just self-destructed after
a while (Signal does this with messages), then the problem would not be
as bad. Copy-pasting something out of context and lynching the author
would now have to be a targeted attack as opposed to something you can
do retroactively any day and any time. Most people would not bother
unless you were a high-profile target. The same arguments Snowden makes
about the NSA collecting a permanent record to then retroactively find
crime as opposed to looking for evidence for an existing investigation
apply to online social communication just as well.

There is of course value in making the list publicly available to build
community, provide a learning resource and so on, so automated
self-destruction seems like a good balance and default to me. Things
become semi-private, or semi-public; words are written on sand instead
of stone.

On 10/2/20 8:57 AM, Yosem Companys wrote:
> https://inre.me/why-privacy-is-the-most-important-concept-of-our-time/
>
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