[liberationtech] On Privacy, Trending Today

[Marc Sunet]

That's interesting to think about. I am probably more paranoid than you
are, but I'd like to expand on some of your points.

> Privacy for me is about data that I dont want to be public, but does
> not apply to
> my opinions when I air them in public, that I dont want to be covered
> by privacy
> although yes, I do not want others to manipulate and misrepresent what
> I writea or say
> but thats another story

I think the question here is what is considered "public". To me, this
mailing list is not as public as, say, explicitly addressing the crowd
in a public event. Here, I am addressing a specific set of people; that
the email happens to be forever-archived and made publicly available
does not make it "public" in my opinion. It's like having a conversation
at the park; that the park is publicly accessible does not mean you
should be nosing around other people's conversations. I think technology
has eroded this concept, in particular social networks like Facebook and
Twitter whose business model relies heavily on making everything
"public" so that the hate and the dissonance can spread and be consumed
like popcorn.

> It does not matter though if the messages are archived or not,
> accessible or not, as far
> as the lynching is concerned, they ll find a way to lynch you even if
> the messages are not archived
>
> In fact, they ll fabricate private messages that cannot be verified
> and hire people to lie about you just to mob you in other ways

I think it does matter, because it fundamentally shifts the attack from
retroactive to proactive/targeted, the latter being orders of magnitude
more expensive. That already shaves off a large portion of the trolls.
And if the remainder insist on targeting you, they'll have to work
harder. Like I mentioned in the email, I think one can also draw
parallels here with NSA surveillance.

There have been numerous examples of retroactive attacks, like somebody
being fired from their job because of something they did or said ten
years ago, which also happened to be recorded for posterity, surfaced
from the depths of the web and taken completely out of context (not to
mention that the person might be a different person 10 years later). The
person gets doxed and the company caves in to the pressure. Spanish
author Juan Soto Ivars devoted a whole book to this called "Arden las
Redes"; I am not sure if it has an English translation. Of course, the
permanent record here is not the root cause of the problem, nor does a
lack of it fully solve the problem, but I think the record does
facilitate the attacks to some degree.

> In that sense, having messages in the open for public scrutiny means
> that anyone could verify what was said, and expose the intentional
> misrepresentation de-contextualization and the manipulation for the
> deliberate  purpose of putting the messenger in a bad light.
I think this assumes that everything I say in public is recorded, which
is not exactly the kind of world I want to live in. And even then, I
don't see what problem this would solve.
> I am all for sticking to the right to say what we have to say, and
> learning how to deal with deliberate targeting of the folks who say
> what  they have to say. We need to continue to build civil society.
> and pay the price for doing it
>
> To instil fear and to injure who are not afraid of free speech is
> ultimately what they want, we need to learn and teach civilization.
> Long way to go, it seems
Yeah, no question there.
>
> On Sat, Oct 3, 2020 at 7:34 AM Marc Sunet <msunet at shellblade.net
> <mailto: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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