Re: [Social-discuss] Control own privacy, posted by _others_

[Story Henry]

> Hellekin O. Wolf wrote:
> *** Putting privacy and free speech in the same pot sounds to me like
> a counter-revolutionary attack on both privacy and free speech.  It
> seems to say: you cannot have privacy if you have free speech, and you
> cannot have free speech if you have privacy.  I wonder when this
> dichotomy appeared, but I relate it to the general trends in warfare
> speech that says "Either you're with us, or against us" and the
> marketing-fascist trend of pushing transparency at all price, "because
> you don't have anything to hide." 
> 
> Free speech in these terms, has become an advertisement for "I can say
> anything I want, especially gossip that lifts the dirty veil of
> secrecy you maintain about your private life".  The panopticon of
> paparazzi. 

I very much agree with your comments.

One way I think one can better defend the issue is by looking at the issue in 
terms of meaning. Free speech and privacy are in important respects issues of 
language and meaning. So if I get some time to develop this in more detail, I 
would start from the theory of speech acts [0].  The meaning of what you say 
(and what you publish) is not determined just by the content, but also by the 
attitude of the sayer, and who that sayer/publisher is.

So you can say something seriously, or you can joke about it, or you can doubt 
it, .... Those are just a few of the very many different attitudes one can have 
when saying something. Confusing them leads to stupid things like the man who 
was recently arrested for a twitter joke [1].

When people listen in to conversations not intended for them, they are not 
listening in on a conversation they can necessarily understand. Or the other 
way around: if everyone has to have a conversation as if one unknown huge and 
not necessarily very intelligent agent were listening, many speech acts that 
could take place, won't take place. At the very least this slows down the 
ability to think critically, and so the ability of a society to respond 
intelligently to problems. Imagine for example that we are developing a game to 
help people work through the consequences of social policies on drug handle, 
war, poverty, etc... Many things will be said very realistically in such 
situations which a listener may not understand as being hypothetical. But 
furthermore it won't be at all effective, as those who really do have a 
destructive mission will use language that will seem innocuous. 

As a result a paranoid listener will end up suspecting everybody: there is 
nothing else he can do. And very soon we are in the same situation as that 
described by the film "The life of Others" [2] which described the situation in 
East Germany before the wall came down. What the film shows very well, is how 
this type of setup is of course easy to corrupt, and in fact ends up creating 
the resistance it was trying to stop. The problem now is that we have a lot 
more powerful tools to do the spying than the east germans had. 

Inversely if you say something in public you are then opening yourself to the 
very rich criticism you can get for what you say, but also from the very great 
work by others you can build upon. This can be both painful, and of course very 
enriching, as we know in the free software movement.


On 10 Apr 2010, at 17:36, Rob Myers wrote:

> On 10/04/10 16:47, Hellekin O. Wolf wrote:
>> 
>> When designing social software, and thinking about these issues, one
>> has to be careful with terms and concepts.
> 
> Do you have a good example of a positive conceptual framework for
> thinking about social software?

It is not that difficult to get things going. What you need is at its most 
basic:

  1- ownership of your publishing infrastructure 
  2- ability to access control who sees what
  
You need 1 so that you can really be sure that 2 does not contain more people 
than you bargained for.  You can do that with foaf+ssl 
http://esw.w3.org/Foaf%2Bssl/FAQ


   On that you can then build a lot more, such as rules perhaps on how you 
allow people to distribute content, and what they have to do when distributing 
it (eg: cite your name, if they don't change it, ...)

Henry




[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_acts
[1] 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/7016266/Man-arrested-under-Terrorism-Act-for-Doncaster-airport-Twitter-joke.html
[2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/