That just highlights the repercussions though - to speak freely you need to resort of mostly anonymous discussion (and maybe consider using Tor to make sure you're extra anonymous).
Russia 1990-2010 or so. We were coming off many decades of speech repression, and everyone understood that it's a treasure when people speak their mind. The Russian segment of LiveJournal had people of all imaginable political views yelling at each other all day, but when a US-based "abuse team" tried banning a few people for an offensive image, everyone saw that as a restriction of speech and rose up in protest. That's how I want the world to work.
Didn't Russia make a habbit of killing journalists who criticized either the old or new regimes from 1990 to present day? Pretty sure that was prevalent. Maybe they weren't tracking online much in the early days though.
I think true freedom of speech is an impossibility of the same vein as freedom of action. Your speech is generally half of an interaction with one or more listeners and forcing their precipitation is impinging on their freedoms.
It is also generally recognized that there is such a thing as dangerous speech but I don't think we even need to start including that category of speech to hit a contradiction - that said we can and should strive to allow as much freedom in expression as possible.
Is this snark or is the difference between what free-speech looks like today and 30 years ago not apparent?
What people are nostalgic for is the ability to have semi-anonymous semi-ephemeral speech.
For example: The ability to have a private conversation in public without fear someone is recording you and can easily use that recording to identify you.
I assure you it was not snark. Your example is not something I would have thought of and is interesting. Probably because I am 29 and for my entire adult life I have assumed all digital communications I participate in can and will be used against me at a future point (which is why I just use my real name here on HN).
And while that is all horrible, I have played Dungeons and Dragons my entire life without persecution and none of the bands I listen to who are the same age as me have been harassed by the government. Not something I can say about the lates 80s and 90s from my understanding of it. (I am referring to the DnD panic and the legal harassment that destroyed the Dead Kennedys among other bands who the Govt pursued)
Well, obviously there are always possible repercussions is you say the wrong thing to the wrong person. But if adults in a relatively free society are having a provate discussion and one says something that offends another, it just does not happen that the offended party "tattles" on the offender.
If you say something offensive to someone, even in private, it's pretty much expected in any setting that the other person will tell all their friends what an idiot you are.
People love gossipping, and they always have. It's just that offline the news won't spread as quickly and the rumors wont reach your boss quite as easily.
Conversely, the ability to put your thoughts in front of millions of people is trivial today. In the past you could speak more freely without repercussions because very few people could hear you.
Politicians should absolutely be held accountable for what they say in a semi-public ("pseudo-private") forum. In this context, the journalist is right.
Making Clubhouse record the calls is, of course, the wrong solution.
>Politicians should absolutely be held accountable for what they say in a semi-public ("pseudo-private") forum. In this context, the journalist is right.
...Only if what they are doing involves a part of their public duties. (Like that covered in the Brown Act in CA) Otherwise, the journalist is not entitled to hear and repeat arbitrary conversations held in confidence between the politician and others. For instance, they aren't entitled to hear conversations between the politican and their spouse about what they like in the bedroom, or their anonymous post on a bathroom furnishings enthusiast forum about which type of toilet can handle massive poops the best. That's simply none of your business.
It is unfortunate that journalists of 2021 see an accountability issue with individuals who can speak privately - but devote zero characters to Gov officials who use private email to dodge accountability via FOIA.
Many government officials just avoid using e-mail at all for sensitive subjects, thus side-stepping the issue entirely. I remember Janet Napoletano (Secretary of Homeland Security) saying that she did most of her business over the phone or in-person to avoid having it on record.
We have a real issue with partisan politics in the US and one of the pieces of fallout is that making a statement like that doesn't end your career. Laws on the public record exist to serve the general good and skirting them is indicative of taking actions you know will be met with general criticism and can't be justified.
> Laws on the public record exist to serve the general good and skirting them is indicative of taking actions you know will be met with general criticism and can't be justified.
Well, the counterargument is that it's indicative of taking actions that you know will be met with general criticism and can be justified.
Hrm - I'll have a go at being less vague. By actions met by general criticism and can't be justified I meant actions that would both be met with criticism and, given enough surrounding information, wouldn't remove the majority of criticism. National security positions will need to execute actions that are pretty opaque and distasteful to the general public but, with that additional information in hand, would be reasonable to most people. So arresting some fellow who looks like a family man but was actually organizing an attack would be generally criticized but justifiable - on the other hand most forms of torture tend to be ineffective at information gathering and cause excessive pain and suffering and are less justifiable.
For politicians I'm going to guess that a lot of stuff they don't want on record is specifically related to their self-betterment by somehow (even minorly) compromising their duty.
To be fair, we also have an epidemic of partial statements being taken out of context and used against their speaker. Often, when contextualized, the quote most likely means the opposite of what it's being used to claim. I can easily think of examples of this being done to politicians of both major US political parties, and a handful of foreign politicians as well.
A policy of staying off-record by default is not an unreasonable countermeasure to that problem.
This is often part of compliance training in financial services. Don't communicate anything that even remotely seems sensitive or questionable over email or chat. It doesn't matter if it's totally innocent, all that matters is whether it can be taken out of context by the SEC or another body.
I mean, this is just plain common sense in the workplace, government or otherwise. Email is on record because of SOX or HIPAA or FISMA, so treat it accordingly.
Common sense would be not saying or thinking or acting on reprehensible things that someone would be afraid of having on record.
An email that, for example, threatens bad performance reviews if an employee doesn't show up at an optional after-hours company fundraiser, is something someone wouldn't want on record. That doesn't mean you should say it in-person in the break room where you're not on record instead of emailing it. It means you shouldn't use performance reviews as a weapon to coerce things you can't or won't contractually demand from employees.
Two tools are great for combating this sort of malfeasance:
First, slip an acknowledgement for the verbal request in an email. Something like "Hey, the company event Friday night which you mentioned was critical to my performance review. Is that business casual?" or "You told me to get this internal request for your project done before taking care of my urgent customer tickets, here it is." can help you keep a paper trail with implicit acknowledgement.
Second, as long as you're not in California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, or Washington, and you have an Android, install a call recorder app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.callrecord... was an app I used for a while in a sensitive situation. Even if you never use it, it's nice to have if something was to blow up.
William Brown - former mayor of San Francisco - was once asked why he didn’t have an email address. His response:
“You know what the E in email stands for? Evidence.”
Not that it really matters. His predecessors have all had plenty of evidence of corruption, have never been as productive as him and they still kept their jobs, so he probably just didn’t want to deal with checking his inbox.
Well when the same people that own media companies are lobbying and bribing politicians to receive throwbacks, seems pretty logical they'd view people speaking about this freely and privately as a problem.
The media doesn't work for us. It works for its shareholders and most media shareholders are pretty alright with corruption in government because they're part of it.
It's why I am such a fan of Andrew Yang's core policy proposals including his "Journalism Dollars" - which I don't think he coined as such, but has a similar purpose to his Democracy Dollars: $100 every year for every citizen to allocate to a journalist of their choice. This would wash out the money received from advertising by the mainstream media channels, and so the narratives that are bought directly or indirectly and lifted up into mainstream via those ad dollars being spent/received - would open up to many more narratives with much more nuance to them, and stories that citizens actually care about; it's important for Journalism Dollars to exist with Ranked Choice Voting and Democracy Dollars as well - so it's not just the 2 core narratives of the duopoly of the two party system being perpetuated/promoted.
Let's say you found out that someone was willing to give you $50 back if you give them $100, but then you also found out that there was a $100,000 reward for telling authorities about this scheme: don't you think at least someone will tell authorities about that scheme to get the $100,000 reward? Along with a sufficient jail time for the person/"journalist" running this scheme.
And that's not even taking into account that we'd likely require a trail for accounting to know exactly where money went, so that it can't simply be "cash spent" to give back $50 untraceable to a bunch of people.
Most of the work done by some "journalists" in 2021 is regurgitating what they see on social media. They wouldn't want to be deprived of this low hanging fruit and go back to doing hard investigative work.
It's insulting to real journalists to call the people at media corporations that just browse social media all day and copy stories as "journalists." They are just part of a content mill creating medium that can be attached to advertisments.
> Most of the work done by some "journalists" in 2021 is regurgitating what they see on social media.
There is a sharp schism between subscription journalism and ad-supported content. For the most part, the former are doing investigatory work. For the most part, the latter are not.
I'll give you that paid outlets do more investigation, but they also do their fair share of filler stories based on AP releases, takes on press releases, or social media trends too
Wasn't it the NYT, the model for online subscription funded journalism, that released that incorrect story accusing Marc Andreessen of saying the word "retard" on Clubhouse? That seems about as bottom of the barrel as it gets.
100% correct. Journalists are just looking for the adulation and affirmation of their fellow progressives, and do so by attacking the weak and defending the powerful.
My thoughts as well. This should be pretty easy to monitor in a newsroom setting. Just have a few phones hooked up to recorders saving everything of interest. Worse, it's probably relatively easy to spoof the app and automate the process.
People should never rely on technology to ensure their content remains ephemeral. Snapchat tried and that obviously never worked. There used to be automated tools that could save content out of the cache automatically.
I think there's another implication at work. If the platform enables recordings, and stores those recording in its cloud 'puters, one could demand it be accountable for things that are being said on it.
It's as if the police learns a group of terrorists used a local coffee shop to meet and go through some details of their operation, and then proceeds to arrest the coffee shop owner not on the grounds that he knows the suspects (for the sake of the story, he doesn't), but on the grounds that an incriminating conversation happened within his walls and he had the chutzpah to not have the place bugged, in case someone is going to need those conversations and so that the owner can be held responsible for the conversations people have in his shop.
In fact I won't be surprised if at least one of replies to this comment expresses a genuine lack of understanding what's wrong with this story. Just sad.
Just because a medium is semi-public doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to deal with privacy.
One case, personal: my friend’s ex-gf is on Clubhouse. He has her unfollowed on Facebook, and he would prefer to see her as little as possible. And yet clubhouse keeps recommending him the rooms she is in, even though he didn’t follow her.
The opposite is true as well - there is no way to subtly hide yourself from someone on Clubhouse (as in: don’t show the other person I’m in the room unless they enter).
As for GDPR - as soon as an app has your private data (like phone number, a list of followers and so on), certain laws apply - having a right to be forgotten for example, or a right to receive what the service has on you.
I’m not sure if Clubhouse adheres to GDPR, but there definitely are things that apply.
Wiretap laws are complex. It would only violate two party consent wiretap laws, many places only have one party consent. If it is a two party consent wiretap law, and the conversation is happening in public, then there's a chance that the 'expectation of privacy' is not there since it's a public conversation, which would put this outside the scope of wiretap laws.
Think of it this way: it's not a wiretap to record a public speaker.
Although a wrinkle is a single user in a two-party jurisdiction overrides and all parties would need to be notified, and if you don't know for sure where each end user is, then you're taking a gamble on the legality.
Answer to the headline: When the app in question is a proprietary app that ostensibly wants to boost engagement using whatever industry standard and novel methods it can find, just like every other proprietary social network.
If it takes off it will go through the same problems that every other unregulated online-casino-posing-as-a-neutral-social-network has gone through. Oops, kids are using it. Sorry. Oops, turns out we're boosting engagement with white supremacist clubs. Sorry. And so forth.
If a factory for get-rich-quick schemes makes it difficult to leave a trail of the damage it's inflicting on its user base, I'm not sure in which moral universe that could be considered a desirable feature.
You must really hate E2EE messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram. They provide dramatically strong privacy guarantees while being proprietary and driving engagement.
What is the reason that users shouldn't be allowed to have the strongest guarantees of privacy possible if it happens to be the case that they are users of "proprietary apps" that want to "boost engagement" (here, of course, engagement being people talking to/with other people)?
This is the most horrifying thing I've read on HN and not seen downvoted to oblivion.
> boost engagement using whatever industry standard and novel methods it can find
AFAICT the challenge of something like Signal is to have a UX that feels like everything else, while being able to essentially prove by design that they cannot leverage the user's data. E.g., they can't plug the user's data into the kinds of nasty rabbit-hole algos as featured on Youtube.
That's not "whatever novel methods" they can find. It's highly constrained given the privacy guarantees they are after.
I didn’t mention signal. Do you claim Telegram’s channels are not novel? Do you think the FB owned WhatsApp doesn’t do whatever it can to drive engagement?
Everything is constrained in some dimension. To assert that E2EE as a constraint immediately removes “whatever novel methods” from consideration is non-sensical. Is CH not constrained by being audio only? By being invite only? By being iOS only? By being mobile only?
I’ll ask again, why is it that users should be denied privacy guarantees because an app is proprietary and wants to drive engagement growth? Do you demand the same for telephone lines?
I sure don't want to answer the question for the guy but as a response to your chain of comments, first let's get it straight that telegram is not E2EE everywhere, it is only E2EE in secret chats. Also it is not entirely proprietary, most of the client's code is open source which is a huge bonus when you know that only your messages are not super private and not all of the data on your phone or computer.
Having Facebook owned crap in the same sentence as telegram is doing telegram dirty, telegram has shown that they stand up for censorship and the program provides a pretty basic privacy level that i think should be the absolute minimum. Whatsapp on the other hand is facebook owned and we all know what that means so no need to elaborate.
E2EE is not everything, it doesn't mean that your conversation are private. Even if you can prove that the proprietary app uses E2EE (Discord said they did use it for voice calls but then they posted charts of what people talked about...) there is the metadata part which is still super goddamn important.
Knowing: (who talks to who, when and where, with what device...etc) is still super effective to fuck someone over.
Lastly, there shouldn't be any privacy guarantee with proprietary apps because you can never know what the app will do, you can make speculations based on intercepting network packets and looking at system logs on it accessing memory places and stuff. But there is always the nice surprise of it doing not what it is supposed to do which is considered by all means malware. Remember even on a pixel with Graphene OS Proprietary apps can still use super sonic tracking if worse comes to worse for them.
Did you even read the article? You keep harping on E2EE, but privacy features like "no screenshots" and "no way to record conversations" have absolutely nothing to do with E2EE. Those are UI defaults, which are a completely different domain of concern, one where these types of dark patterns typically and quickly emerge in these types of social networks.
So again-- if someone builds the same ole' shitty proprietary business model on an "at all costs" growth model that adopts an early band of scam artists, it is without a doubt undesirable to make it difficult for the future victims of those scams to collect evidence. (And it doesn't matter that one could get a screenshot, and that one could record the audio, defaults matter.)
You keep moving the goal posts with regards to your original point which was generally about privacy. First you did it with the weasel word of “novel” while mocking my “misquoting” of you and then proceeding to reference a product I made no mention of.
Now you’re talking about the specific features located in CH and then talking about “scam artists” with, of course, no meaningful definition or description of what that could possibly mean in this context.
In the specific case of Clubhouse, it was and possibly still is leaking channel and user IDs in cleartext over UDP.[0] I have no idea whether the NYT is referring to this.
I'm kind of impressed at the mental gymnastics needed to make journalists wanting to hear what powerful people are talking about in a semi-public place into the stasi.
I haven't paid close attention, but I think he wouldn't have a complaint if these journalists had uncovered a conspiracy worthy of public attention and instead were basically tattling on people for using bad words when the bad words were just quoting e.g. reddit.
A year ago, Greenwald was a hero here. Now, everyone downvotes any mention of him because he reported a story across party lines. Truly pathetic. I fucking hate HN sometimes.
There is an argument to be made that privacy is just a polite euphemism for (mostly white-) privilege that is really an anti-democratic shield from accountability for propagating hate and intolerance. In democratic societies that put equality and diversity first, the only people who could have something to hide are sexists, racists, homophobes and white supremacists, because we live in an open society where we have fought so that historically oppressed people no longer have to hide who they are.
If that statement is uncomfortable, this is the level of criticism that anyone building a new, divergent, or privacy focused technology or platform can expect from mainstream institutions in the current political climate. We can rail and write screeds against how insane it is, or we can write the code that gives people the tools to preserve the human dignity and freedom that individual privacy makes possible. (mods, please delete if this crosses the provocation line, it seemed important and topical enough to take the risk.)
What's wrong with being anonymous by default? The EU has been fighting for 'functional deanonymisation' and they raise some good points. There's nothing to lose and only to gain when you have privacy by default and only release information as the situation requires it - like online purchases.
Likening anonymity to being silenced is a little far-fetched idea when compared to simple acts like avoiding data leaks.
I personally think that all the new diversity are the ones that would want privacy. So they can communicate and form ideas in confidence that they can then use to tell the rest of society. When gay people congregated in secret to talk about their position in society, they were happy they could do it in secret. That statement doesn't make me uncomfortable, it just makes me think that the view behind that statement is far too optimistic about how tolerant people are in society. Racism will be around in 100 years. Privacy helps any human being.
Well if a mainstream institution makes a similar argument then they are missing the whole point of privacy, there is the usual point about how everybody has something to hide. If you do not think so then please forward me all your private account information and <i>i promise</i> to not look into everything you have done on them. Even just taking that arguments and dissecting it to reveal the hidden agenda behind it is way too much effort.
But the main point is that there is no need to explain why you need basic privacy, it is already revealed why you need it when the NSA goes on a manhunt when somebody reveals that they can search every information on you with a single click. Or when the big five get their shady practices revealed they get defensive and start making bull crap points, or that there are laws on privacy for a reason. Their arguments always have a ton of flaws because they are only after an agenda, public shaming is the answer to their bull crap. "If you aren't doing some shady stuff with that binary then why aren't you releasing the source code?"
This reads like a variant of the "if you have nothing to hide" argument.
I don't value anonymity because it allows me to say offensive things without consequence. I value anonymity because mob justice is arbitrary and disproportionate.
People can and will harass you over the stupidest perceived slights, or just because you're hot. Some people won't be satisfied with just attacking your arguments, no matter how petty the subject.
If you're given sufficient attention, you're bound to make someone unreasonably angry, no matter your stance. Privacy protects you from those loonies.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadThe dog doesn't either. Cats, an empty room, same story.
Add anotger human to the equation, and my, how circumstances change.
It is also generally recognized that there is such a thing as dangerous speech but I don't think we even need to start including that category of speech to hit a contradiction - that said we can and should strive to allow as much freedom in expression as possible.
What people are nostalgic for is the ability to have semi-anonymous semi-ephemeral speech.
For example: The ability to have a private conversation in public without fear someone is recording you and can easily use that recording to identify you.
And while that is all horrible, I have played Dungeons and Dragons my entire life without persecution and none of the bands I listen to who are the same age as me have been harassed by the government. Not something I can say about the lates 80s and 90s from my understanding of it. (I am referring to the DnD panic and the legal harassment that destroyed the Dead Kennedys among other bands who the Govt pursued)
People love gossipping, and they always have. It's just that offline the news won't spread as quickly and the rumors wont reach your boss quite as easily.
Making Clubhouse record the calls is, of course, the wrong solution.
...Only if what they are doing involves a part of their public duties. (Like that covered in the Brown Act in CA) Otherwise, the journalist is not entitled to hear and repeat arbitrary conversations held in confidence between the politician and others. For instance, they aren't entitled to hear conversations between the politican and their spouse about what they like in the bedroom, or their anonymous post on a bathroom furnishings enthusiast forum about which type of toilet can handle massive poops the best. That's simply none of your business.
This is about politicians using Clubhouse to talk to their constituents. It qualifies.
Well, the counterargument is that it's indicative of taking actions that you know will be met with general criticism and can be justified.
For politicians I'm going to guess that a lot of stuff they don't want on record is specifically related to their self-betterment by somehow (even minorly) compromising their duty.
A policy of staying off-record by default is not an unreasonable countermeasure to that problem.
An email that, for example, threatens bad performance reviews if an employee doesn't show up at an optional after-hours company fundraiser, is something someone wouldn't want on record. That doesn't mean you should say it in-person in the break room where you're not on record instead of emailing it. It means you shouldn't use performance reviews as a weapon to coerce things you can't or won't contractually demand from employees.
Two tools are great for combating this sort of malfeasance:
First, slip an acknowledgement for the verbal request in an email. Something like "Hey, the company event Friday night which you mentioned was critical to my performance review. Is that business casual?" or "You told me to get this internal request for your project done before taking care of my urgent customer tickets, here it is." can help you keep a paper trail with implicit acknowledgement.
Second, as long as you're not in California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, or Washington, and you have an Android, install a call recorder app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.callrecord... was an app I used for a while in a sensitive situation. Even if you never use it, it's nice to have if something was to blow up.
“You know what the E in email stands for? Evidence.”
Not that it really matters. His predecessors have all had plenty of evidence of corruption, have never been as productive as him and they still kept their jobs, so he probably just didn’t want to deal with checking his inbox.
The media doesn't work for us. It works for its shareholders and most media shareholders are pretty alright with corruption in government because they're part of it.
And that's not even taking into account that we'd likely require a trail for accounting to know exactly where money went, so that it can't simply be "cash spent" to give back $50 untraceable to a bunch of people.
Why don't you think that would work?
There is a sharp schism between subscription journalism and ad-supported content. For the most part, the former are doing investigatory work. For the most part, the latter are not.
Is it so that if it’s not a big red in-app button, it’s too complicated?
I dunno, the journalists carry their handy recorders with them all the time, have they forgotten how they work all of a sudden?
People should never rely on technology to ensure their content remains ephemeral. Snapchat tried and that obviously never worked. There used to be automated tools that could save content out of the cache automatically.
It's as if the police learns a group of terrorists used a local coffee shop to meet and go through some details of their operation, and then proceeds to arrest the coffee shop owner not on the grounds that he knows the suspects (for the sake of the story, he doesn't), but on the grounds that an incriminating conversation happened within his walls and he had the chutzpah to not have the place bugged, in case someone is going to need those conversations and so that the owner can be held responsible for the conversations people have in his shop.
In fact I won't be surprised if at least one of replies to this comment expresses a genuine lack of understanding what's wrong with this story. Just sad.
One case, personal: my friend’s ex-gf is on Clubhouse. He has her unfollowed on Facebook, and he would prefer to see her as little as possible. And yet clubhouse keeps recommending him the rooms she is in, even though he didn’t follow her.
The opposite is true as well - there is no way to subtly hide yourself from someone on Clubhouse (as in: don’t show the other person I’m in the room unless they enter).
As for GDPR - as soon as an app has your private data (like phone number, a list of followers and so on), certain laws apply - having a right to be forgotten for example, or a right to receive what the service has on you. I’m not sure if Clubhouse adheres to GDPR, but there definitely are things that apply.
Think of it this way: it's not a wiretap to record a public speaker.
Even in all party consent states, a clubhouse session might qualify as public speaking and not be subject to any recording restrictions.
Although a wrinkle is a single user in a two-party jurisdiction overrides and all parties would need to be notified, and if you don't know for sure where each end user is, then you're taking a gamble on the legality.
If it takes off it will go through the same problems that every other unregulated online-casino-posing-as-a-neutral-social-network has gone through. Oops, kids are using it. Sorry. Oops, turns out we're boosting engagement with white supremacist clubs. Sorry. And so forth.
If a factory for get-rich-quick schemes makes it difficult to leave a trail of the damage it's inflicting on its user base, I'm not sure in which moral universe that could be considered a desirable feature.
What is the reason that users shouldn't be allowed to have the strongest guarantees of privacy possible if it happens to be the case that they are users of "proprietary apps" that want to "boost engagement" (here, of course, engagement being people talking to/with other people)?
This is the most horrifying thing I've read on HN and not seen downvoted to oblivion.
> driving engagement
I wrote
> boost engagement using whatever industry standard and novel methods it can find
AFAICT the challenge of something like Signal is to have a UX that feels like everything else, while being able to essentially prove by design that they cannot leverage the user's data. E.g., they can't plug the user's data into the kinds of nasty rabbit-hole algos as featured on Youtube.
That's not "whatever novel methods" they can find. It's highly constrained given the privacy guarantees they are after.
Everything is constrained in some dimension. To assert that E2EE as a constraint immediately removes “whatever novel methods” from consideration is non-sensical. Is CH not constrained by being audio only? By being invite only? By being iOS only? By being mobile only?
I’ll ask again, why is it that users should be denied privacy guarantees because an app is proprietary and wants to drive engagement growth? Do you demand the same for telephone lines?
Having Facebook owned crap in the same sentence as telegram is doing telegram dirty, telegram has shown that they stand up for censorship and the program provides a pretty basic privacy level that i think should be the absolute minimum. Whatsapp on the other hand is facebook owned and we all know what that means so no need to elaborate.
E2EE is not everything, it doesn't mean that your conversation are private. Even if you can prove that the proprietary app uses E2EE (Discord said they did use it for voice calls but then they posted charts of what people talked about...) there is the metadata part which is still super goddamn important. Knowing: (who talks to who, when and where, with what device...etc) is still super effective to fuck someone over.
Lastly, there shouldn't be any privacy guarantee with proprietary apps because you can never know what the app will do, you can make speculations based on intercepting network packets and looking at system logs on it accessing memory places and stuff. But there is always the nice surprise of it doing not what it is supposed to do which is considered by all means malware. Remember even on a pixel with Graphene OS Proprietary apps can still use super sonic tracking if worse comes to worse for them.
So again-- if someone builds the same ole' shitty proprietary business model on an "at all costs" growth model that adopts an early band of scam artists, it is without a doubt undesirable to make it difficult for the future victims of those scams to collect evidence. (And it doesn't matter that one could get a screenshot, and that one could record the audio, defaults matter.)
Now you’re talking about the specific features located in CH and then talking about “scam artists” with, of course, no meaningful definition or description of what that could possibly mean in this context.
At least try to be coherent and consistent.
https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/clubhouse-china#appen...
If that statement is uncomfortable, this is the level of criticism that anyone building a new, divergent, or privacy focused technology or platform can expect from mainstream institutions in the current political climate. We can rail and write screeds against how insane it is, or we can write the code that gives people the tools to preserve the human dignity and freedom that individual privacy makes possible. (mods, please delete if this crosses the provocation line, it seemed important and topical enough to take the risk.)
Likening anonymity to being silenced is a little far-fetched idea when compared to simple acts like avoiding data leaks.
But the main point is that there is no need to explain why you need basic privacy, it is already revealed why you need it when the NSA goes on a manhunt when somebody reveals that they can search every information on you with a single click. Or when the big five get their shady practices revealed they get defensive and start making bull crap points, or that there are laws on privacy for a reason. Their arguments always have a ton of flaws because they are only after an agenda, public shaming is the answer to their bull crap. "If you aren't doing some shady stuff with that binary then why aren't you releasing the source code?"
I don't value anonymity because it allows me to say offensive things without consequence. I value anonymity because mob justice is arbitrary and disproportionate.
People can and will harass you over the stupidest perceived slights, or just because you're hot. Some people won't be satisfied with just attacking your arguments, no matter how petty the subject.
If you're given sufficient attention, you're bound to make someone unreasonably angry, no matter your stance. Privacy protects you from those loonies.