Let me start with the most important objection: he's basically advocating for anonymity to protect oneself from violence. Asking the (potential) victim to change their behaviour because of others' willingness to break the law tends to be unhelpful, especially in the realm of political violence, where victims are looking for support more than actual safety advice.*
It's especially egregious considering he's agonising about a problem that's basically solved. At least in the US and Europe, acts of political violence are negligible. And while the few that remain are tragic and deserve further efforts, his attitude of we'll-never-solve-this-abandon-ship seems...off?
Some more unsorted notes:
- If at all, I'd frame this problem more in terms of political dissidents in Turkey/China/Russia/etc. (But yes–this post was apparently inspired by a recent meeting, making the focus understandable)
- Those levels he comes up with seem to be completely arbitrary. I could invent as many such levels as needed: "the safety to order physical goods", "the safety to know that medical information is accurate" etc.
- His "golden" level of online safety comes across as a sort of caricature. Firstly, I'm not sure if anybody uses the term "social justice advocate" without irony or ill intent–but I'm not a native speaker and may be mistaken.
- As one of those people he's talking about, I think the "“safety” most social justice advocates tend to focus on" is the safety of a woman having an abortion, or a poor African-American being stopped by police. But yeah, I guess there are some that get death threats and it's probably not a good life when the mob comes for you.
Doxxing, human flesh mobs, griefing, swatting and attacking livelihood are very much risks for online publishers of all cultural stripes. This is not a solved problem.
>Asking the (potential) victim to change their behaviour
TFA explicitly states that "preventing the attacker from harming the content creator" is the ideal. They are pointing out additional defensive steps that can be taken.
Yep, taking action to prevent oneself from coming to harm while also working toward a world in which the mechanism of harm doesn't happen are not mutually exclusive. A cyclist who campaigns for safer bike lanes and legislation against cars hitting bikes probably still wears a helmet.
Interesting feedback, since I was attempting to carefully avoid advocating for anyone to do anything. My target audience in offering examples/suggestions of anonymity techniques was the extremely non-technical friends and family who talk to me about having read my blog -- if the post sounded insightful to a technology professional, I would view it as having placed them in the lucky 10,000 for pieces of expected knowledge.
The post was written from a place of annoyance toward a specific and unfortunately not-yet-public set of proposals to bring about the safeties I lumped into the 4th group, while disregarding the benefits of the others. It sounds caricaturey because I was drawing a caricature to demonstrate the implausibility and fragility of such safety, and you have guessed my opinions of "social justice" accurately. My actions toward it are neutral or supportive because it beats the alternatives, but there's a good reason I usually leave my personal opinions out of technical content.
As to whether the problem of safety online is solved, ask the people who identify as victims of pretty much any technology-facilitated harm or scandal how they feel about the matter.
It sounds like you have a highly knowledgeable perspective on the physical/political safety side of things, and it'd make a fantastic post on your own blog!
Those "levels" of safety are extremely important now, especially in EU where we have discussions about rolling public WIFIs by the municipality governments, those petty politicians are still blinded by the power that they can abuse. The online stalker problem, doxing and identity theft are not something I expect to be solved in the near future. I'd say that your blog post was a bit of rambling but the ideas are interesting.
6 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 27.0 ms ] threadLet me start with the most important objection: he's basically advocating for anonymity to protect oneself from violence. Asking the (potential) victim to change their behaviour because of others' willingness to break the law tends to be unhelpful, especially in the realm of political violence, where victims are looking for support more than actual safety advice.*
It's especially egregious considering he's agonising about a problem that's basically solved. At least in the US and Europe, acts of political violence are negligible. And while the few that remain are tragic and deserve further efforts, his attitude of we'll-never-solve-this-abandon-ship seems...off?
Some more unsorted notes:
- If at all, I'd frame this problem more in terms of political dissidents in Turkey/China/Russia/etc. (But yes–this post was apparently inspired by a recent meeting, making the focus understandable)
- Those levels he comes up with seem to be completely arbitrary. I could invent as many such levels as needed: "the safety to order physical goods", "the safety to know that medical information is accurate" etc.
- His "golden" level of online safety comes across as a sort of caricature. Firstly, I'm not sure if anybody uses the term "social justice advocate" without irony or ill intent–but I'm not a native speaker and may be mistaken.
- As one of those people he's talking about, I think the "“safety” most social justice advocates tend to focus on" is the safety of a woman having an abortion, or a poor African-American being stopped by police. But yeah, I guess there are some that get death threats and it's probably not a good life when the mob comes for you.
>Asking the (potential) victim to change their behaviour TFA explicitly states that "preventing the attacker from harming the content creator" is the ideal. They are pointing out additional defensive steps that can be taken.
The post was written from a place of annoyance toward a specific and unfortunately not-yet-public set of proposals to bring about the safeties I lumped into the 4th group, while disregarding the benefits of the others. It sounds caricaturey because I was drawing a caricature to demonstrate the implausibility and fragility of such safety, and you have guessed my opinions of "social justice" accurately. My actions toward it are neutral or supportive because it beats the alternatives, but there's a good reason I usually leave my personal opinions out of technical content.
As to whether the problem of safety online is solved, ask the people who identify as victims of pretty much any technology-facilitated harm or scandal how they feel about the matter.
It sounds like you have a highly knowledgeable perspective on the physical/political safety side of things, and it'd make a fantastic post on your own blog!