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If I decide to tell you, or everyone who reads HN comments, that I'm gay, then that's up to me. I can choose whether and how to disclose, or not to disclose, de

If I decide to tell you, or everyone who reads HN comments, that I'm gay, then that's up to me. I can choose whether and how to disclose, or not to disclose, depending on my evaluation of risk, which will be fairly accurate because I have a lifetime of experience in making such risk assessments and seeing how they play out. (In this case I'm not too worried, because I've been out for a long time, so if it gets broadly fashionable again to discriminate against us queers then I already have the same problems in either case.) If I use a dating app that promises it will maintain its data about my orientation as confidential, and that app turns out to have been lying all along, then I'm forced to run the risk no matter whether I would have chosen to do so. Because I can't know who is accessing that data or what they're doing with it, I don't even have a way to know how much risk I've been forced to take on. And because I have no way to remove my information from the dataset, I don't have any control over how long that risk continues to be present; I have to assume it's forever, or at least as long as a copy still exists. It's a good example in microcosm of all the issues around handling sensitive data that this industry has had ever since anyone began trusting us with such data in the first place.

pessimizer 5y ago
I agree with all that you and lostgame have posted, but I think it's irrelevant in modern times. There are so many ways to track us (that are probably being stored indefinitely) that your sexual orientation, private religious or political beliefs, or anything else that can be gleaned from your movements and associations will be available for any future administration that decides a certain class of people should be rounded up. The Holocaust, through computerized processing of census data (via IBM), found "Jews" who didn't even know that their maternal grandmothers were Jewish. Comparing those primitive records and tech to today is like comparing Hiroshima to the nukes of today. If some US administration 20 years from now decided that they wanted to round up all of the communists, homosexuals, and Jews with a 90% certainty, even assuming technology hasn't advanced an inch in the interim, they could get the list within days. I think it would be easy even if we turned off the data spigots today and 20 years from now they only had access to data collected between the dawn of web 2.0 and now.
- throwanem 5y ago
  I've never been all that favorably inclined to the counsel of despair. That goes double when we're discussing an issue that goes to the heart of how we as an industry conduct ourselves - to what standard we hold ourselves and one another. Granted, right now no such standard exists. I don't think that will always be true; if we don't regulate our own behavior then someone will certainly do so for us. I think it'd be a good idea if we had a say in how it happens, and when we have people apparently arguing that no one should expect anyone to hold us to any standard, it's very hard for me even to imagine an argument in support of the idea that we deserve one. I'd also like to think that, by being in this industry, we're not all in the position of an RJR or Philip Morris employee trying to believe we aren't really peddling addiction and cancer. Whether that sort of thing bothers anyone else, it's not up to me to decide, though I think it should. It does bother me.
fennecfoxy 5y ago
This is exactly it, and it's also why it's so frustrating when straight friends introduce you to others as "gay". It's like, hey that's my business to say so and not yours.

pessimizer 5y ago

I agree with all that you and lostgame have posted, but I think it's irrelevant in modern times. There are so many ways to track us (that are probably being stored indefinitely) that your sexual orientation, private religious or political beliefs, or anything else that can be gleaned from your movements and associations will be available for any future administration that decides a certain class of people should be rounded up. The Holocaust, through computerized processing of census data (via IBM), found "Jews" who didn't even know that their maternal grandmothers were Jewish. Comparing those primitive records and tech to today is like comparing Hiroshima to the nukes of today. If some US administration 20 years from now decided that they wanted to round up all of the communists, homosexuals, and Jews with a 90% certainty, even assuming technology hasn't advanced an inch in the interim, they could get the list within days. I think it would be easy even if we turned off the data spigots today and 20 years from now they only had access to data collected between the dawn of web 2.0 and now.

throwanem 5y ago
I've never been all that favorably inclined to the counsel of despair. That goes double when we're discussing an issue that goes to the heart of how we as an industry conduct ourselves - to what standard we hold ourselves and one another. Granted, right now no such standard exists. I don't think that will always be true; if we don't regulate our own behavior then someone will certainly do so for us. I think it'd be a good idea if we had a say in how it happens, and when we have people apparently arguing that no one should expect anyone to hold us to any standard, it's very hard for me even to imagine an argument in support of the idea that we deserve one. I'd also like to think that, by being in this industry, we're not all in the position of an RJR or Philip Morris employee trying to believe we aren't really peddling addiction and cancer. Whether that sort of thing bothers anyone else, it's not up to me to decide, though I think it should. It does bother me.

fennecfoxy 5y ago

This is exactly it, and it's also why it's so frustrating when straight friends introduce you to others as "gay". It's like, hey that's my business to say so and not yours.