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Web3 social networks cannot preserve privacy

2 points by atlasV ↗ HN
While everyone is making a huge hoo-ha about web2 social network privacy, in web3 no one will be able to delete their posts thus no right to revoke. Wonder why there is no noise about web3 privacy - unless pseudonyms becomes a thing we could all just leave our toilet doors open aswell for data mining!

7 comments

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wmf
This is not a given. It's likely that a lot of things would be off-chain.
atlasV
curious, what would be the point of having posts off-chain? The whole premise is that the chain is open hence no one can censor etc.
wmf
Obviously keeping data off-chain helps if you want mutability. It's also cheaper and faster. I could imagine a social network where only identities are on-chain.
dane-pgp
You could also have the hashes of the content on-chain, so that subscribers could determine if they are receiving only a subset of the posts on the feeds they are subscribed to.

The trade-off for this feature, of course, is that a publisher wouldn't be able to plausibly deny having ever written some archived post which later gets them in trouble, but if you're only sharing posts with your friends, and their servers respect your delete requests, this might not be a problem in practice.

atlasV
just the hashes on chain would mean a central org can censor anytime .. they wont be any diff than twitter.. the biggest problem with bitclout like on chain socials would be that people wont be able to change for the good or obv go back on what they said.
atlasV
sure one way of looking at it..
atlasV
In the new open world censorship would be public shaming (with some sort of labels) - scary and interesting at the same time