On Fri, Apr 07, 2017 at 02:21:10PM +0000, Gianfranco Costamagna wrote:
> I didn't suggest that, but privacy online is seriously something that
> *doesn't* exist, and people not understanding that are simply wrong.
I disagree strongly with this statement.
Privacy isn't a boolean thing. It's not something that's "on" or "off".
It is, instead, something that has many facets; you can have more
privacy and less privacy relative to another forum at the same time.
For example, when I send an email to another developer's personal email,
my expectation of privacy is not the same as when I send it to
debian-private, whose privacy is different from when I send it to a
publically-archived mailinglist of a particular team that I'm part of,
which in turn has different privacy levels from debian-devel, and that
in turn is different from the very public forum of
debian-devel-announce.
It is true that privacy on the Internet is generally at a low level;
when I say something online, there is always the chance that someone
records that statement without my knowledge, and publishes it somewhere
else. In that sense, you are correct that the general level of privacy
online is lower than it is in life in general. But to go from there to
say that there is absolutely no privacy online is a bridge too far.
When I make a statement on IRC, I do it in the understanding that I'm,
generally, talking to the people who are on IRC at that point in time.
I'm not talking to the Internet as a whole. Yes, I do understand that
sometimes people might log IRC channels (if nothing else, because I do
so myself), and yes, if meetbot (or some similar program) is active,
that does mean that logs will be publically archived. However, even so,
it is reasonable to assume that what you say on IRC usually stays on
IRC.
Your argument that some information on IRC might be useful does hold
some merit, however, but then going from there to "let's publically
archive all IRC channels" is overdoing it, IMO. Instead, I would suggest
that one of the following is done:
- Encourage people to not make information public exclusively on IRC.
Debian does mailinglists as its primary mode of communication, so
everything that really matters is done on mailinglists.
- If some team prefers to use IRC over mailinglists, then rather than
going "let's make everything public because there might be something
useful in there, see xyz", just make those team's channels be public.
Thanks,
--
< ron> I mean, the main *practical* problem with C++, is there's like a dozen
people in the world who think they really understand all of its rules,
and pretty much all of them are just lying to themselves too.
-- #debian-devel, OFTC, 2016-02-12
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