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today I again had occasion to refer to @danny's 2003 piece https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2003/10/13/the-register/ on private communications
"...we have conversations in public, in private, and in secret. All three are quite separate. The public is what we say to a crowd; the private is what we chatter amongst ourselves, when free from the demands of the crowd; and the secret is what we keep from everyone but our confidant. Secrecy implies intrigue, implies you have something to hide. Being private doesn’t." [1/2]
"There are only two registers on the Net; public and secret. In the public sphere, everything you say is for everyone. Talk in the secret register, and you have something to hide.
And this is what the end of privacy means. It means the end of the *private* register. Not everything that is private is meant to be secret, meant to be hidden. It’s just not intended to be public. That grey area is fading, and soon it will be gone."
[2/2]
@brainwane social networks with access control lists kinda* give us 'private' mode? I can say something globally, or to different sets of people, or one person. (* With imperfections and capitalism and maybe _they_ read _all_ our messages)
@bolson but Danny makes the point that the systematic access control list itself (a) is *secrecy* in that it is an active choice rather than an ambient reality and (b) is likely only temporarily not-public: "On the net, you have public, or you have secrets. The private intermediate sphere, with its careful buffering. is shattered. E-mails are forwarded verbatim. IRC transcripts, with throwaway comments, are preserved forever. You talk to your friends online, you talk to the world."
@brainwane this is probably the biggest thing i miss from livejournal - it understood this distinction in a way that most services today really don't
@doy I use Dreamwidth, and yes it's too rare for social networks/platforms to properly understand how people want to do access control. And yet I do think Danny is also saying that LJ-style access filtering is more on the "secret" than "private" side
@danny feel free to correct me here or elsewhere in the thread of course
@brainwane @doy oh hai! I missed this thing (I lurked a bit on the MeFI threads and enjoyed it, but didn't have much to add).
LJ was something I was thinking about at the time (I remember pestering bradfitz about what %age of LJ users posted /just to themselves/). Access controls only get you so far, you need strong social censure against cut-and-paste, screenshotting etc. LJ and Dreamwidth both have/had that, I recall. I don't know how that would have played out had they been the drivers
@brainwane @doy (I wrote this before Facebook, remember!)
ung @brainwane hmm. I'm on a Mastodon fork, #hometown , that lets me speak to just the people on my instance. It's nice!
@pronoiac It does sound nice! And I think it's what Danny refers to as the shattered "private intermediate sphere" given the preservation and copyability/forwardability of an artifact shared (initially) under those kinds of rules
@brainwane heck yeah i have stuff to hide!
- credit card numbers
- medical records
- ideas for novels/products
- family communications
- bank account details
- property deeds
You can't have *privacy* without *security*, but you *can* have security *without* privacy.
Be most wary of those (systems) which would obscure this fact.