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To me this brings into discussion the distinction between legal privacy and ethical privacy. If I'm walking down the street and tell my SO something in confiden

To me this brings into discussion the distinction between legal privacy and ethical privacy. If I'm walking down the street and tell my SO something in confidence (perhaps a medical diagnosis), and you are walking behind me and overhear, legally it's your right to spread what you hear to anyone you want. Ethically... it would be wrong to do so. I do think people view online privacy through that same lens... We have community bubbles, that are technically public, but we feel confident speaking within them for whatever reason. Yes people need to be more conscious of where communication take place, but it does not excuse unethical, legal, abuse of privacy.

yifanl 8y ago
Communications on the internet are different than physical communications. So different in my view as to not really have a useful comparison point. If I tell a joke, people will chuckle and it'll be on their mind for 10 seconds, and then it's gone. All I need to do to make sure no one is overhearing it is to do a quick look over my shoulder. And if someone does leak it, I'll know which 6 people it might be and I can confront them. If I write that same joke down online, it's there forever, anyone can grab the joke any amount of time later, strip out all surrounding context, report me and have me fired from my director gig. Our social systems were developed with the understanding that communications would persist for a minute at most. This does not translate well to online systems.
- rexpop 8y ago
  Our social systems will adapt; James Gunn will survive, but also his and similar examples may impose a chilling effect on discompassionate writing.
  - discompassion 8y ago
    It's basically a fact now, that anything you say in any text messaging service to anyone, no matter how encrypted or protected the service may claim to be, if you say something interesting, your friend is likely to capture the screen contents to an image, and publish it somewhere to get laughs. There's no stopping this fact, and with daily zero day fire drills, the defense of claiming an insecure, hacked smartphone is at fault, is essentially plausible. But it gets worse, because hacking isn't a even required step. One sketchy app installed on a phone with zero defects is enough to plausibly deny a sceenshot of a private conversation escaping into the wild. People breeze past those permissions authorizations all the time. But of course installing promiscuous app isn't even a required step, because some phones have stock apps installed at the factory, and are insecure out of the box. Or, hey, maybe they bought their phone second-hand, because phones can cost $1000 now, so knocking a hundred bucks off the sticker price isn't even unconscionable, and less technical users are clueless as ever, so they wouldn't even consider the risks. So, no matter what, at the consumer level, truly no one is in control of how things leak, even if you choose your friends wisely. An Apple engineer can't even let his daughter look at a prototype over lunch without her accidentally instagramming the world in a moment of irrevocable error. So, chilling effects? I mean, without question, when being deaf and mute to the point that one may as well be bound and gagged is the only cure, calling that "chilling effects" is quite the understatement. We are moving rapidly toward a society that only thinks "happy" thoughts, for fear of the consequences oherwise. Is such a fear healthy?
    - watwut 8y ago
      That is not what happened to Gunn. And my friends were never shitty like that. I would never call someone like that "a friend". And realistically, while IT crowd knows about hacks, most people dont, because such hacks are in fact rare.
pishpash 8y ago
But that's why this sort of exercise should be universal. Internet communities are not a model of real life. They're not "technically" public, they are public. If somebody walked up behind you too close you'll know and you'll know whom. There is no such thing on the internet. So let's not pretend they are similar and instead make people always aware that they are being blasted in public. That way they will not be mistaken, or take the moral hazard of security by obscurity, and instead seek out truly secure solutions.
- Sangermaine 8y ago
  It's exactly this sneering "user beware" attitude that fosters abuse of privacy online. It's (probably) well-intentioned and supposed to push people to take privacy and security more seriously, but what it has actually done is created a general culture of blaming the victim where everything not being absolutely locked down being up for grabs, and if you mess up in any way and are harmed it's your own fault so quit whining. I think the parent is right: if we tried instead to foster a culture that respects privacy as an ethical issue first it would greatly improve everyone's experience online. Privacy should be a bedrock principle, not something that exists only as far as the strength of the personal digital fortress you can erect.
  - pishpash 8y ago
    Now we're getting into philosophy. Moral imperatives not backed by proper incentives haven't worked since society grew larger than a few thousand people, much less in the faceless, boundary-less, transactional world of today. I am not blaming the victim nor tasking them with sole responsibility for privacy breaches. Instead, I'm proposing an explicit contact with what is already reality, that is, the lack of any privacy. This will do several things, one, strip away the illusion that there is privacy and the delusion that it can be protected when there are no barriers except in some people's minds; two, shift the cost-reward curve immediately (rather than through incremental or hidden breaches) toward taking action rather than not for producing the capabilities and structures that move towards your goal.
pbreit 8y ago
Venmo's "friend feed" I believe is perhaps the singular reason Venmo succeeded where others have failed. However, I don't totally get the point of the public feed. The only thing I can think is that it showed new/light users that Venmo had a lot of activity and ideas for when to use Venmo (ie, if you saw a message from strangers "Payback for lunch" it would plant the seed to use Venmo for such).

yifanl 8y ago

Communications on the internet are different than physical communications. So different in my view as to not really have a useful comparison point. If I tell a joke, people will chuckle and it'll be on their mind for 10 seconds, and then it's gone. All I need to do to make sure no one is overhearing it is to do a quick look over my shoulder. And if someone does leak it, I'll know which 6 people it might be and I can confront them. If I write that same joke down online, it's there forever, anyone can grab the joke any amount of time later, strip out all surrounding context, report me and have me fired from my director gig. Our social systems were developed with the understanding that communications would persist for a minute at most. This does not translate well to online systems.

rexpop 8y ago
Our social systems will adapt; James Gunn will survive, but also his and similar examples may impose a chilling effect on discompassionate writing.
- discompassion 8y ago
  It's basically a fact now, that anything you say in any text messaging service to anyone, no matter how encrypted or protected the service may claim to be, if you say something interesting, your friend is likely to capture the screen contents to an image, and publish it somewhere to get laughs. There's no stopping this fact, and with daily zero day fire drills, the defense of claiming an insecure, hacked smartphone is at fault, is essentially plausible. But it gets worse, because hacking isn't a even required step. One sketchy app installed on a phone with zero defects is enough to plausibly deny a sceenshot of a private conversation escaping into the wild. People breeze past those permissions authorizations all the time. But of course installing promiscuous app isn't even a required step, because some phones have stock apps installed at the factory, and are insecure out of the box. Or, hey, maybe they bought their phone second-hand, because phones can cost $1000 now, so knocking a hundred bucks off the sticker price isn't even unconscionable, and less technical users are clueless as ever, so they wouldn't even consider the risks. So, no matter what, at the consumer level, truly no one is in control of how things leak, even if you choose your friends wisely. An Apple engineer can't even let his daughter look at a prototype over lunch without her accidentally instagramming the world in a moment of irrevocable error. So, chilling effects? I mean, without question, when being deaf and mute to the point that one may as well be bound and gagged is the only cure, calling that "chilling effects" is quite the understatement. We are moving rapidly toward a society that only thinks "happy" thoughts, for fear of the consequences oherwise. Is such a fear healthy?
  - watwut 8y ago
    That is not what happened to Gunn. And my friends were never shitty like that. I would never call someone like that "a friend". And realistically, while IT crowd knows about hacks, most people dont, because such hacks are in fact rare.

pishpash 8y ago

But that's why this sort of exercise should be universal. Internet communities are not a model of real life. They're not "technically" public, they are public. If somebody walked up behind you too close you'll know and you'll know whom. There is no such thing on the internet. So let's not pretend they are similar and instead make people always aware that they are being blasted in public. That way they will not be mistaken, or take the moral hazard of security by obscurity, and instead seek out truly secure solutions.

Sangermaine 8y ago
It's exactly this sneering "user beware" attitude that fosters abuse of privacy online. It's (probably) well-intentioned and supposed to push people to take privacy and security more seriously, but what it has actually done is created a general culture of blaming the victim where everything not being absolutely locked down being up for grabs, and if you mess up in any way and are harmed it's your own fault so quit whining. I think the parent is right: if we tried instead to foster a culture that respects privacy as an ethical issue first it would greatly improve everyone's experience online. Privacy should be a bedrock principle, not something that exists only as far as the strength of the personal digital fortress you can erect.
- pishpash 8y ago
  Now we're getting into philosophy. Moral imperatives not backed by proper incentives haven't worked since society grew larger than a few thousand people, much less in the faceless, boundary-less, transactional world of today. I am not blaming the victim nor tasking them with sole responsibility for privacy breaches. Instead, I'm proposing an explicit contact with what is already reality, that is, the lack of any privacy. This will do several things, one, strip away the illusion that there is privacy and the delusion that it can be protected when there are no barriers except in some people's minds; two, shift the cost-reward curve immediately (rather than through incremental or hidden breaches) toward taking action rather than not for producing the capabilities and structures that move towards your goal.

pbreit 8y ago

Venmo's "friend feed" I believe is perhaps the singular reason Venmo succeeded where others have failed. However, I don't totally get the point of the public feed. The only thing I can think is that it showed new/light users that Venmo had a lot of activity and ideas for when to use Venmo (ie, if you saw a message from strangers "Payback for lunch" it would plant the seed to use Venmo for such).