[liberationtech] On Privacy, Trending Today

[Paola Di Maio]

Marc

thanks for continuing this discussion, privacy is important, as well as
trending
but its a complex, multidimensional issue

We are not dealing with honesty ignorance or simple fallacy but with
vicious deviated powerful and criminal organisations operating within legal
systems (such and govenrments) above and beyond the law- often in the name
of national or global security, who have the power to
distort/omit/manipulate information to influence the public opinion. This
is done routinely, sometimes called politics,

Honest surveillance exists for example, when I entered a country last March
they told me at the airport that my phone was going to be tracked by
contact tracing apps because of Covid - they did not ask my permission, but
they informed me, verbally
I may even have signed a card to say I agree in some foreign language I
dont understand, but I dont remember, I was tired and wanted to get in

I may not like it, but I am not afraid of this situation, Basically now
that I know, if I dont want to be tracked, I can leave the phone at home.
Unless someone is going to misuse this tracking situation for other
purposes, which nobody may ever know

Dishonest surveillance is when I dont know who is tracking my location,
every movement I make every word I say, what they do with this info
possibly feed it to networks which may contain disgruntled folks who may
want to see me dead - for whatever reason , possibly ideological  political
personal
I am more afraid of this latter scenario.which is quite common, and
undocumented. all done under the radar

Especially when the person being tracked is/was a journalist, or researcher
who may have accidentally stumbled across
some dodgy fact and may have made some public disclosure in the public
interest of such facts and is now the targed of some secret state

Privacy is a human right, but it is regularly infringed by we dont know
who, why or how
They do not document breaches of privacy, they make sure not to leave any
trail behind when they do

 Marc Sunet <msunet at shellblade.net> wrote:.

> 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.
>
>
The privacy issue may benefit from being defined on a scale,  degrees of
privacy.
For me, based on my awareness of surveillance, even what I think in my mind
or do in my bathroom may be or become public to some extent (not that I
authorize this, is done without consensus). They can track my every online
activity,  every word I search for, every noise I make listen in through
the microphone on my laptop next room, or by simply hanging something from
the window.
(note: I am VERY paranoid, but have learned that surveillance is a fact and
live with it)

Posting on a mailing list which is publicly accessible, for me is public.
(cyberpublic)

 Posting to a list that is accessible only members, is less public. etc,
possibly on  a scale

Private emails, or private conversations in public places, are not intended
to be public,
however when someone snoops then posts to public lists, it becomes public
Everywhere I go, every train, every appointment with friends, I wonder if
the person sitting next to us
is recording what we say - (veeery paranoid)  I live with that and as you
imagine, I do not have much of a life
and live far from people

Much information is not public - say wrongdoing of all sorts is carried out
by governments and corporations privately  but it should be, I think

There is nothing that can be done to prevent people with motivation and
technology, or policy (say a mandate to carry out surveillance if you, your
interlocutor or the conversations you have may be considered a matter of
national security)

What is considered a matter of national security, should be of pubic concern
But it is not., is it?

It can get very complicated :-)

Even privacy advocates can be twisted to abuse privacy (say to spy or to
stalk physically or virtually others) if
someone they trust tells them that spying on people is carried out to
protect them or their privacy, ultimately for their own
safety some people infring your privacy with that justification



> 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.
>
> for me, it is a surveillance technology that erodes the concept. Social
media play a part, but its is what is not public
that may impact the public that needs to be better addressed
 yes maybe,  but at least public information is open to scrutiny.by
everyone not just a single party


> 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.
>
the point here for me is not the information, but the attacks and the
motives.
someone with a motive to attack will find or create information to use for
that purpose
yes, public information may be easier , but those with motivation have
budgets, big budgets

entire education systems, science, research funding, legislations are built
on partial facts or false facts
and those who expose them, are persecuted and surveillance and breaches of
privacy are the mechanisms
for this prosecution.
If its secret states, corporations or powerful political or economic
lobbies who are after you, the fact that your
postsa may not be publicly accessible will not stop them, there are plenty
of ways to get to people, much of the prosecution of innocent folks is done
with public money but the justice system itself in democratice countries
where
politics is controlled by money


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.
>

no, I am referring to public information which is deliberately shared
openly with the purpose to exercise freedom of speech and opinion, and/or
to infor  and it is recorded as in publicly accessible mailing list
archives
or other public records.
A lot of person information is public or findable with little effort and
incerasingly so.





> 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.
>

Very big topic, not black and white


PDM




>
> On Sat, Oct 3, 2020 at 7:34 AM 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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