an interesting analogy: 1-to-1 email used to be considered private. actually, a lot of people still use it with an expectation of privacy (see: password resets sent over email, politicians regularly having their incriminating emails leaked, or good ol’ personal correspondence). but technically it’s never been all that private: most SMTP servers don’t mandate SSL, and even with SSL most email remains readable and indexed by Google.
i have no problem when the people i intended to reach save and index my email. yet i think i’m reasonable in being upset whenever i discover a new party i didn’t know/expect is doing it (e.g. NSA).
SMTP sniffing, SNI sniffing, DNS sniffing: these are all instances where ingesting “openly available” data is beneficial to the party doing it but costly to me (it limits my ability to speak freely with a consenting party without consequence).
fediverse is clearly split on this. some people have expectations based more in personal correspondence, and don’t want to end up in the same situation as email where the adversarial relations and negative externalities are just de-facto/accepted. others have expectations based in mass-media, where the further your comms travel the better. but for most users, they use the protocol for a mix of both, and that makes for a messy and difficult to reason about situation.
some of this is solvable with protocol upgrades. but that’s going to take a lot of time, and it’s not clear that every social norm even can be enforced technically.
i have no problem when the people i intended to reach save and index my email. yet i think i’m reasonable in being upset whenever i discover a new party i didn’t know/expect is doing it (e.g. NSA).
SMTP sniffing, SNI sniffing, DNS sniffing: these are all instances where ingesting “openly available” data is beneficial to the party doing it but costly to me (it limits my ability to speak freely with a consenting party without consequence).
fediverse is clearly split on this. some people have expectations based more in personal correspondence, and don’t want to end up in the same situation as email where the adversarial relations and negative externalities are just de-facto/accepted. others have expectations based in mass-media, where the further your comms travel the better. but for most users, they use the protocol for a mix of both, and that makes for a messy and difficult to reason about situation.
some of this is solvable with protocol upgrades. but that’s going to take a lot of time, and it’s not clear that every social norm even can be enforced technically.