[liberationtech] On Privacy, Trending Today

[Yosem Companys]

These are all excellent points.

BTW, you might remember there was much debate over whether the list should
be private or public, but the decision was made to make it public because
otherwise it would have granted an illusion of privacy that would not have
protected vulnerable populations from adversaries seeking to hack the list.

Things have changed since then, and there are now apps available like
Signal that could be used for this purpose. Are any of these set up to
function as large "mailing" lists?

On Fri, Oct 2, 2020 at 4:34 PM Marc Sunet <msunet at shellblade.net> wrote:

> 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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