this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2023
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I agree with a lot of the spirit of what they're saying, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't agree with their concrete applications of it (although they are unclear in the thread).
I think blurring the lines between public and private spaces is the opposite of informing consent. Cultivating unrealistic expectations of "privacy" and control in what are ultimately public spaces is actually bad, imo.
Informed consent in the fediverse should look something like a message on the signup page that says: This is a publishing system. Be aware that everything you publish here will be distributed to a bunch of other servers which are not under the control of us, the operators of your server. When you edit or delete something you've published, we will honor it and relay the message, but other servers may or may not honor it. There are many other tools for private (encrypted) group communication, but that is not what this is. ActivityPub is for publishing.
ps: I, for one, am glad that the Internet Archive exists!
Are cafés public, or private spaces? Can I just sit at the table next to yours and stream and record your conversation with your friends?
Yes. Business that can afford it have security cameras. And more relevantly, nobody talking in a cafe thinks their conversation is private and that nobody will overhear it. We use a combination of location within the space, voice level, and body language to show how we want others to interact with us. If you walk into the cafe and make an announcement at the front, you have no right to expect that nobody will respond to that announcement, or tell others about it, or even record you while you make that announcement. That is what posting on the fediverse is like. If you want a quiet conversation in the corner, you can post unlisted.
But unlisted toots are still technically public. If you scrape my profile, you will get them. And the point is: the fact that they are public in the technical sense does not mean I consented to them being scraped etc.
Just as wearing a short skirt is not blanket consent to sexual advances.
Then that's a scope issue with your server software.
This is what I was trying to say with the analogy to a public announcement. Public speech has no expectation of privacy. Nobody would find anything wrong with recording a public announcement. If you want to have a private conversation, it's up to you to hold that conversation privately.
This is a ridiculous analogy. Scraping public text, which is something that's been widely accepted on the web for two decades, is not remotely similar to sexual assault.
Please let me know where you live and which cafe you frequent. I'll just stand there while you have a quiet conversation with your SO, my phone recording everything you say. You won't object, naturally, because it's a public space and if you didn't want your romantic conversation broadcast live on Twitch you'd have had it elsewhere, right?
Saying that "she asked for it; she was dressed like a slut" was widely accepted in the world at large for THOUSANDS of years (and still is in some places!). Until it suddenly wasn't. In some parts of the world.
Hell, pounding the shit out of someone for being "rude" was (and is) widely accepted for thousands of years. Not all that long ago, in human historical terms, killing someone for talking back to you was not only acceptable, it was required to preserve your "honour" (or whatever other term was used in that space).
Maybe—and just hear me out here—maybe things that are "widely accepted" have turned out to be shitty things, not things to be emulated and amplified.
(Please wait until I'm in your cafe and recording before you respond, though. I want to make sure that thousands of people are listening in.)