2 ms·
> Elaborating, he explained that privacy wasn't even guaranteed a few decades ago: he used to live in a small town without home phones where the postmaster saw
by ashton314 7y ago
> Elaborating, he explained that privacy wasn't even guaranteed a few decades ago: he used to live in a small town without home phones where the postmaster saw who everyone was getting mail from. "In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing."
Terrible, stupid analogy. If I wanted to have a private conversation with someone, I could just close my door or make sure no one was eavesdropping in the bushes. Perfect secrecy. In the digital realm, there's always a danger that my message will be recorded, decrypted, or analyzed and I have no idea how long that message will live. Internet communications are insecure, but that is not the default in real life person-to-person interactions.
It does work in some sense: everyone in town will know you bought that fancy new thing, etc.—there's less privacy there—but as far as communication has been concerned, the default was private: no one other than the participants hears the message.
- a_c 7y agoAnd I think scale matters. We are living in an eavesdropping-on-steroid era
- specialist 7y agoAgreed. Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everyone compared kids online convos to real life, from memory: Kids hanging out in a food court, gossiping about this and that, are talking to each other. Not to outsiders. And adults eavesdropping are creepy. They treat their online chatting the same way. What I take away from Shirky's (many) observations is that social conventions haven't adapted to the new reality and that our new communication technology was implemented irrespective of social norms. I haven't used Snap, so this is speculation: I think it's tech of short-lived messages tried to implement social norms. Which would be exceptional in the tech world.