Re: having public irc logs?
Gianfranco Costamagna <locutusofborg@debian.org> writes:
> the main sadness comes to a lot of friends, sharing on "private/semi
> public places" a lots of private pictures, without understanding the
> damage that they might receive in case of leaks.
> saying "I told you" doesn't help fixing the problem, after a leak has
> been done there is nothing left to do to repair it.
> being aware of that is the most important thing, and there is nothing to
> leak when something is public :)
This is indeed a real problem, but the solution to this problem is not to
further erode what remaining privacy we have. It's to find ways to
rebuild privacy using technical and social means, because privacy is a
necessary human right, while continuing to give people pragmatic and
cautionary information about the frequent violations of that right.
I'm frustrated by how we occasionally seem willing to give up on privacy
just because it's hard and is currently under attack. We don't do that
with other human rights, and we shouldn't do that with this one. For
example, it's equally true that criminal justice is hard, and often people
only get the justice that they can pay for, but we don't then conclude
that we should teach people to assume the police are useless and should
never be contacted, that crimes should not be reported because it's
pointless, and we should instead take private revenge against criminals.
Instead, we try to mix pragmatic cautions with an attempt to fix the
system and blunt its worst abuses, with an understanding that we *need* a
functional criminal justice system to be a civilized society.
This means we live in a world of complicated tradeoffs and cautious,
fraught decisions rather than in a world of clear black-and-white options.
But, well, that's reality.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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