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If anyone has tips on how to build privacy-preserving social media without being marked a Nazi, a terrorist, a pedophile or a totally regular suicide I'm listen

If anyone has tips on how to build privacy-preserving social media without being marked a Nazi, a terrorist, a pedophile or a totally regular suicide I'm listening. Edit: I'm totally serious, even Signal barely manages to exist, is blocked from federating for reasons of the preservation of the developers' personal safety and has publically been compared to the KKK by FBI officials. It's not a fun or bright situation but it is how things are right now.

shaki-dora 7y ago
Maybe start by not conflating privacy with concerns about censorship. Then, it'd be great if privacy-focussed platforms would show a commitment to find privacy- and freedom-preserving ways to tackle the very real problem of these platforms overflowing with actual, self-marking Nazis. As an analogy: if the cryptocurrency community can find ways to curb problems such as scams or the waste of energy with technology, it can avoid the regulation to that effect it so much fears. But every time some cryptobro opines that people really deserve to be scammed if they did not go through each single line of source code their bitcoin wallet depended on, the idea that these communities are sticking up for some larger values and not feeling quite ok with scammers and Nazis loses a bit more of its legitimacy.
- incompleteness 7y ago
  You can never have eavesdropping and privacy at the same time. The best one can do is installing mechanical filters, but those cannot be privacy-preserving and constitute effective censorship at the same time. There is no solution to that, there is no middle ground possible without dropping the law of the excluded middle, which make all concepts and words meaningless and thus does not represent a "win". E.g. even using homomorphic encryption does not solve anything. One could use that to scramble messages containing certain words, but that would only be detectable to the receiving party, and then they could just work around the wordlist, e.g. by communicating in ones and zeroes. And that new form of communication would not be detectable my the middleman until they hack the endpoints using a side channel, so the middle-man will happily pass on this new type of messages indefinitely. You're conflating scamming with exploiting code vulnerabilities. They're similar but the former is social code and the latter is computer code. You're also slandering the crypto community; this is part of the reason why we don't yet have user-friendly crypto, and effectively live with massively compromised privacy through the banking system, which is also the main reason surveillance capitalism has been implemented worldwide and is now even set to take over India. Please try harder, you make Nazi's look reasonable in comparison. Please don't lend the current fascist uprising in India credence just because you're salty about nerds on Twitter. Edit: please provide me with feedback re. how I'm not adding to the discussion because it is certainly non-obvious to me.
  - dang 7y ago
    "Please try harder, you make Nazi's look reasonable in comparison" breaks the site guidelines badly. Please see my other reply to you at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21908329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21908329.
    - incompleteness 7y ago
      You're right, that's totally unnecessary. I'm sorry. Not a great holiday season, solitude and painful realisations for Christmas. Delete or cut into my posts if that makes sense to you, I can't edit them anymore. I'll go watch the Grinch and be quiet.
      - dang 7y ago
        I'm sorry to hear that and hope that things get better soon. No need to delete or cut into anything.
- rebuilder 7y ago
  It would really be great if privacy and anti-censorship advocates could solve the problem of extremism! Seems like a bit of a tall order, though. What you're really proposing, IMO, is this: Privacy and anti-censorship advocate (PA): I think we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we're trying to curb extremism by requiring messaging services to police their users. The problem is real, but the methods being used to address it are completely antithetical to the fundamental principles of free societies. I want to let people talk to each other on-line without anyone listening in on them or stopping them from saying whatever they want to say. You: OK, you can do that if you can make sure no Nazis can use your service to further their agenda. PA: That seems impossible, given the goals I've stated. Furthermore, this is precisely what I meant with "throwing the baby out with the bathwater." IOW, I don't think there's a technical solution to be found here. This is a fundamental ideological divide, and needs to be dealt with as such.

shaki-dora 7y ago

Maybe start by not conflating privacy with concerns about censorship. Then, it'd be great if privacy-focussed platforms would show a commitment to find privacy- and freedom-preserving ways to tackle the very real problem of these platforms overflowing with actual, self-marking Nazis. As an analogy: if the cryptocurrency community can find ways to curb problems such as scams or the waste of energy with technology, it can avoid the regulation to that effect it so much fears. But every time some cryptobro opines that people really deserve to be scammed if they did not go through each single line of source code their bitcoin wallet depended on, the idea that these communities are sticking up for some larger values and not feeling quite ok with scammers and Nazis loses a bit more of its legitimacy.

incompleteness 7y ago
You can never have eavesdropping and privacy at the same time. The best one can do is installing mechanical filters, but those cannot be privacy-preserving and constitute effective censorship at the same time. There is no solution to that, there is no middle ground possible without dropping the law of the excluded middle, which make all concepts and words meaningless and thus does not represent a "win". E.g. even using homomorphic encryption does not solve anything. One could use that to scramble messages containing certain words, but that would only be detectable to the receiving party, and then they could just work around the wordlist, e.g. by communicating in ones and zeroes. And that new form of communication would not be detectable my the middleman until they hack the endpoints using a side channel, so the middle-man will happily pass on this new type of messages indefinitely. You're conflating scamming with exploiting code vulnerabilities. They're similar but the former is social code and the latter is computer code. You're also slandering the crypto community; this is part of the reason why we don't yet have user-friendly crypto, and effectively live with massively compromised privacy through the banking system, which is also the main reason surveillance capitalism has been implemented worldwide and is now even set to take over India. Please try harder, you make Nazi's look reasonable in comparison. Please don't lend the current fascist uprising in India credence just because you're salty about nerds on Twitter. Edit: please provide me with feedback re. how I'm not adding to the discussion because it is certainly non-obvious to me.
- dang 7y ago
  "Please try harder, you make Nazi's look reasonable in comparison" breaks the site guidelines badly. Please see my other reply to you at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21908329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21908329.
  - incompleteness 7y ago
    You're right, that's totally unnecessary. I'm sorry. Not a great holiday season, solitude and painful realisations for Christmas. Delete or cut into my posts if that makes sense to you, I can't edit them anymore. I'll go watch the Grinch and be quiet.
    - dang 7y ago
      I'm sorry to hear that and hope that things get better soon. No need to delete or cut into anything.
rebuilder 7y ago
It would really be great if privacy and anti-censorship advocates could solve the problem of extremism! Seems like a bit of a tall order, though. What you're really proposing, IMO, is this: Privacy and anti-censorship advocate (PA): I think we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we're trying to curb extremism by requiring messaging services to police their users. The problem is real, but the methods being used to address it are completely antithetical to the fundamental principles of free societies. I want to let people talk to each other on-line without anyone listening in on them or stopping them from saying whatever they want to say. You: OK, you can do that if you can make sure no Nazis can use your service to further their agenda. PA: That seems impossible, given the goals I've stated. Furthermore, this is precisely what I meant with "throwing the baby out with the bathwater." IOW, I don't think there's a technical solution to be found here. This is a fundamental ideological divide, and needs to be dealt with as such.