One of my favorite Dilbert strips is Asok asking "Why is this document stamped CONFIDENTIAL? If I spent my entire life trying, I would not be able to find anyone who cared to read it."
"So if someone is going through my private things, for example, and gets upset about what they find, then that’s their problem, not mine!” Must agree... until someone makes it your problem, by social standards, laws, or anything else they can use to make your life harder.
It's all fine until you wind up on some sort of watchlist because of something "someone" found, and then travelling by air is a nightmare.
I'm not sure why, exactly, we decided that people we don't like but we can't pin any crimes on are punished by having limited access to air travel, but that's how it is!
On a related and more personal note, I once got in a large amount of trouble for a slashdot post. The company I worked for found a post I wrote when I wasn't an employee discussing social engineering attacks on building security(not theirs, mind you, but general ones). This led to some very tense discussions where I was accused of being a hacker, not caring about security, and plenty of other things. My personal (though public) livejournal came to the discussion, too. It was to the point where, if they tried to haul me in again, I would have requested an attorney.
It ultimately blew over and was recognized for what it was; Corporate Security trying to justify the money they spent on data mining. But it was a very tense period.
After that incident I keep things a lot less public.
I had a similar thing happen to me back in high school, where my personal blog I was keeping had repercussions with some of the student populace. Pretty quickly after, I set the whole thing to private and stopped updating. I've run several blogs after that, but none of them where public and containing personal information.
This is such bullshit - poorly formulated hippy dribble.
If he was really interested in such ideas, he would know and use GPL/AGPL/MIT/Apache licences already for his code, and CC for his writings.
Instead he makes everyone hippy dippy stupid about secrecy and privacy. It might all be fine when you are rich, cis-straight and white, but a single non friendly idea and you are a threat to the state.
People that cheapen our privacy and secrecy rights shouldn't be allowed this much airtime.
This is honestly the most worthless comment I have ever seen on HN. Besides ad hominem, there is literally nothing here other than a giant pile of conspiracy.
So samstave put it better, but essentially my argument isn't ad hominem, it's attacking the notion that YOUR secrets mean nothing to ME, which can be generalised to ANYONE's secrets mean nothing to ANYONE. Which is obviously untrue.
Yet that is the conclusion he comes to.
The other possible conclusion, as I noted, is that he has previously been unaware of Free/Open Source and Creative Commons based licenses. In which case he needs not talk on secrets but rather on licensing.
You seem to have changed what he said into a bizarre absolute. The point of Derek's post is that many of us unnecessarily keep many things secret for no rational reason at all. He's just suggesting that we ask ourselves, "Why is this secret?" Because a lot of the time, we're just needlessly building paper walls around our insecurities rather than keeping important secrets.
And given that Derek has code licensed under MIT, your conclusion that he was unaware of that license is obviously incorrect.
To play devil's advocate: The comment was poorly worded, but there is a kernel of truth in it.
Being openly gay in the 1940-50's in some places in the US may very well have been a death-sentence. Those people would have been wise to keep their sexuality private (or move somewhere a bit more progressive). Likewise today, you wouldn't have to look too hard to find countries where people have to hide their true beliefs from repressive governments or society out of a justified fear of harm.
What I think the commenter meant to say was that the blog author is a member of (I assume) a privileged class in (again, I assume) a privileged society. The public/open lifestyle he suggests might be a worth-while pursuit for others in a similar position as he, but it may very well be foolish for those less fortunate. Context matters.
> It might all be fine when you are rich, cis-straight and white, but a single non friendly idea and you are a threat to the state.
There's certainly a large amount of people prejudiced and powerful enough to harm those who don't fit their worldviews, but be careful, too, to not let cynicism taint your views or you might become a bit like them.[1]
Derek's post tells a personal anecdote, but the conclusion has a business angle: "I wanted to challenge that fear that someone is going to steal our ideas."
Sometimes you're hiding a business idea. Sometimes you're hiding a state secret, or keeping a state from discovering a secret. However, most of the time, we're hiding personal secrets about our lifestyles because society doesn't like them.
Since you mentioned "cis-straight", I think Derek's argument is in the same vein as the advice given to LGBT children: do not try to be someone else just because some people don't accept what you are. Be yourself and be proud, or at least comfortable.
[1]: You're right about the state or another powerful entity going after people who are somehow unsettling them. My question is: is it better, in the long run, to hide and stay silent, or to stand up and be heard by the rest of society?
>"I was surprised it was all meaningless to me. These pages meant the world to her, but to me they meant no more than any non-secret conversation we’d ever had. It was the same stuff that we all think."
Uh - yeah this is completely naive. Here is why; the informatin is meaningless to you only if you are not looking to manipulate, exploit, blackmail or have the upper hand of the person holding the secrets.
This is why the dragnet is insidious. Because it may be insignificant to the rural farmer; but valuable aagainst the urban lawyer seeking office, the corp exec or other heeled/monied power wielders...
I don't think he's making a point the NSA dragnet (which I'm assuming you're referring to) - that's obviously a completely different thing.
He's talking about individuals willfully releasing information, not some secret government program to collect all your personal data that has ever been on the Internet.
While that may be true - this article is addressing the sentiment of privacy in general; "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about" -- and it uses a very personal anecdotal perspective on this matter: ones Diary.
He, as I quoted, notes that this information in the super-super private diary was not only provided to him for perusal over cider, but that it was nothing that was of interest to him.
This is a ridiculous statement, to me, on several levels. To illustrate, please provide me the email address of the friend with the super-super private diary; I would like to ask anonymously over the internet to be afforded the same luxury of reading this material. Do you think my request would be agreed to? No, this guy had a personal relationship with this diary author, however intimate/or not, but it was a personal relationship none-the-less.
The idea here is that there is private information that one should have private from anyone - but will choose to share it with those in their intimate circles. This is not the same as saying "Why is anything that is factual secret" and thus who cares if it gets read by some anonymous entity that may or may not have any vested interest in knowing my secrets.
That quote doesn't really work for me, because it seems to be assuming that no other lines are available to provide context.
Or rather, instead of meaning "everybody is guilty of something", I interpret the message as warning about the dangers of relying on a quote taken out of context.
...instead of meaning "everybody is guilty of something", I interpret the message as warning about the dangers of relying on a quote taken out of context.
It's not a concerned person's warning, it's a gloating celebration of ruthlessness, of power, and of the inconsequentiality of facts. It's bragging.
If your every statement is recorded, it will be possible to find something in that record to make trouble for you, should powerful parties feel the need. "Guilt" and "innocence" are, in this context, meaningless abstractions.
In the context of coding projects, the author's conclusion seems realistic.
Given current events though, I can't help but wonder if there's a subtext about privacy and snooping. If so, then I would venture this observation: Your friend's super-secret diary is meaningless to you only because you have no desire to abuse the access you've been given. Suppose instead your friend's devious enemy obtained the diary. Then, he could probably use it to damage your friend's relationships and/or career.
Now imagine a dystopian future when all such diaries are available to a privileged subset of society. Imagine the power that subset would hold, and all the ways it would likely be abused.
Unless we want to ensure our every communication and personal note is fit for public consumption, some things are by definition our secrets.
For me, the information asymmetry is what's upsetting. Everyone's location data being free and public seems, well, ok to me. But no exceptions for any reason.
Really? You think that, for instance, someone trying to leave an abusive partner doesn't have more reason to want their whereabouts unknown than someone with no psychotic acquaintances? Someone who turned state's witness against their drug dealer friends?
Let's flip that around. The key point would be "everyone's location ... No exceptions". Then you'd know if that abusive partner was approaching you (and call relevant authorities). The dealers would probably also be known without needing a witness. Of course, we'd also know who was sleeping with whom and when.
It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine such a world but for it to be viable, society would have to have very different views on a lot of things.
If we're not capping the level of abuse it could easily be too late though. Let's take it to the extreme, somebody wants to kill you and you have no choice but to broadcast your location to everybody. Some people receiving that data, you don't know who, are happy to do the killing for the person who wants to kill you. Afterward they can be identified and tracked down, but at this extremity it's too late.
For people that have rational minds. What about people who are irrational or have some sort of mental illness? I guess that's just a "too bad" for the person who is now dead?
Yes its too bad when I'm dead. I could done anything I could have done to prevent that but there will always be somebody who are irrational or have some sort mental illness or anybody who could eventually find a way to kill me if they really want to. This is happen in open or private society.
I don't think someone fleeing an abusive partner would necessarily benefit as much from knowing the abuser's location as much as the abuser would benefit from the victim's location. The information would be symmetric, but the value from it might not be.
Maybe the abuser has a car and victim is relying on mass transit. Or maybe the victim's best bet is staying with a friend whose residence is unknown to the abuser.
Agreed. I think even arguing this point shows a lack of understanding of how these cases work. Believing that information equality is the same as power equality is a fallacy.
In the case of witness protection: The witness does not know every member of the mafia, but the mafia knows the witness. There is inherently an asymmetry of power in such situations.
Assuming that the location is based on tracking a mobile phone, the aggressor could quite easily leave their phone at home and if they need a phone take an unregistered one.
The problem with open information is that those with evil intent can take precautions to ensure their activities aren't monitored.
This is not the problem with open society in itself. The same problem happen in private society. Anybody motivated enough can hack through your secret given enough effort.
"Given enough effort" is the key there. Just because someone can break into your house given enough effort doesn't mean you leave your doors off the hinges.
I'm very happy for you that you feel that you not in a position where that is a risky step. Are you able to fathom that others may not be in that same situation, or are you content to be blasé to their differing circumstances?
You're being ridiculous. So if someone has someone else they fear will hurt then, there is no reason whatever that that dangerous person shouldn't know their whereabouts because in principle it is possible for the potential victim to know their whereabouts?
Assuming most people on HN are good programmers, there is clearly no linkage between a person's ability to write RoR code and how to reason about normal things in the world. I'm just being honest.
The problem is you can not make the judgement, that making everyone's location public is ok, for everyone. People have different preferences towards their privacy. We should respect other's choice.
The reasons for privacy are always so contrived. "Dystopian futures", "enemies trying to ruin lives" etc. etc. It never resonates with me.
I think what the author is trying to say is that if you live an open life with few secrets, then your life will be less stressful. He's encouraging us to really reevaluate what we keep secret b/c when you sit down to think about it, it's most likely all in your head.
Hats off re good promo and topicality - but I'd expect something a bit more broadly reflective and nuanced. Really don't think you've thought this one through. You seem to have taken a line for a walk and inadvertently reinvented the asinine 'nothing to hide' argument here. The whole thing about say, the Stasi, was that they were interested in all the everyday comings and goings, not the James Bond stuff. That's the depressingly mundane and terrifying reality of mass surveillance. That's why it was referred to as the 'boot in the face of humanity' by a smarter and better informed person than any of us.
> It could also mean reevaluating what you've made public, and deciding what should be secret.
aka chilling effect - surely you're not seriously advocating for it?
I'd love for you to ask the person what she would think about you sharing her diary with everyone she knows (her family, her coworkers, her boss etc). Would it be equally meaningless and uninteresting to them?
You don't have to imagine contrived futures to see why privacy is important. You only need to look at the present, or even easier, the past. Rational people dominate neither governments nor society. Privacy and secrecy are the first line of defense that the oppressed have against prejudice.
As far as "enemies trying to ruin lives", it's wonderful that you are so privileged as to even be able to think of that as "contrived", but you would do well to pay attention to other people's situations.
The benefits of privacy go somewhat beyond what you've listed. As I often do in these conversations, I suggest starting with Daniel Solove's paper, "'I've Got Nothing to Hide,' And Other Misunderstandings of Privacy" link: http://tehlug.org/files/solove.pdf
If you don't have any of that to worry about -- no regrets, no past mistakes -- that's great for you. That might be why the thought of someone having access to your "secrets" seems so contrived.
But what about someone with mental health problems? Depression or anxiety? A past drug addiction, or merely alcoholism? A criminal record? How about something as "innocuous" as a drunken one night stand while in a committed relationship? Is it so difficult to imagine how, if widely known, these facts might impact someone's ability to hold down a job, or their relationship with their neighbors?
For other people who do have things they'd rather keep private, it's not just in their head-- it can have a wide variety of implications in your interactions with people & society if it becomes common knowledge. If nothing else people will look at you differently. And a lot of it has happened in the past and is unchangeable, and therefore unactionable in the present.
In an open society, I would expect society people view toward this issue will change as well. If everybody know my things and I know everybody things, hopefully stigma or negative impact an toward the issue mentioned will be less.
You've got to be kidding ... Sure, the world would be different if everyone was a computer that was written by you ... OK, fine, but what does that have to with anything?
There can never be something such as truly open society, not in the foreseeable future.
As truth becomes the norm, the value of lies becomes greater. If you lie constantly your lies have less value, than if you tell truth but lie about important facts.
IMO Truly open society can only be established if faking a signal is impossible. Which I doubt it will ever be.
Yeah not truly open society like you said but I imagine with the advancement of technology where information can be gathered easily by anyone, it will be close enough.
Yes open transparent society, this the future I'm looking forward to. I would no need to hide my credit card number, bank account, sexual quirk, etc, If anybody trying to abuse that, they will be easily tracked.
The world doesn't need to know your sexual quirks, or your bank balance, and you shouldn't feel the need to broadcast it.
People I interact with know I have a wife, they don't need to know her favorite lube or position. That is crude and unnecessary, and a society that expects that knowledge and welcomes it with open arms has a major root issue.
In the world where information easily gathered I don't even need to hide these thing. If you know my favorite lube then whatever, I would know yours or other people too. These things would not be taboo or strange.
Oh please. I call shenanigans on everyone promoting this view, including the OP. I find it hard to believe you are all special humans that have no things you wouldn't want other or particular people to know. It's like pretending a monk or something, it's sort of pretentious.
It's one thing to never have been persecuted or discriminated against yourself, but it's not really excusable to be so completely unaware of your own privilege and sheltered life.
And when you step out of line, or just step on the wrong toes, and someone decides to make your life miserable for some trivial reason, you've given them a whole arsenal to use against you.
You consider yourself part of the 'in' group. I follow all the rules, why would anyone bother me? And that works fine until one day it doesn't. The day that happens you'll get no help from the other people that think the way you do.
It's fine if it doesn't resonate with you, but that's evidently because your perspective is limited by your relatively good fortune.
"Dystopia" wouldn't seem so contrived to residents of East Germany under the Stasi. We're not speaking in hypotheticals. There is precedent for societies using the available technology to erode privacy as much as possible.
"Enemies trying to ruin lives" wouldn't seem so contrived to some people who've had abusive, stalker exes. Read about some of the things people do for personal vendettas. It may not have happened to you, but it probably happened to somebody you know.
"I think what the author is trying to say is that if you live an open life with few secrets, then your life will be less stressful." Until someone unexpectedly uses your personal information to materially harm your well-being. Then your life becomes much more stressful.
Now imagine a dystopian future when all such diaries are available to a privileged subset of society. Imagine the power that subset would hold, and all the ways it would likely be abused.
Surely that power comes not from the honesty of the words in the diary, but from the fear that those words become widely known. Do most people have something to hide that is so shameful, so damning? In many cases is secrecy a luxury we might quickly be happy not to have? Is this current need for privacy because society is less accepting of us as people? Perhaps our obsession with privacy is the problem, not the solution.
FTA: I still believe in privacy. It’s just a matter of questioning which things need to be private, and which things really don’t.
Doesn't this address your attempt at a point? He has some things which he realized he kept private for no reason so he opened them up. The content of peeps is, in fact, not his to share (if I gave you my phone # to contact me, I would not consider it reasonable, without foreknowledge, for you to dump it into a public DB).
It's not public domain — he hasn't put in a license at all. I'm sure he'll correct the oversight sooner or later. Right now it looks like he just switched the private flag on his existing repos.
My favorite thing on GameFAQs is the angry verbiage at the end of every FAQ promising dire legal consequences should anyone attempt to appropriate and profit from their work. Do you really think anyone anywhere is going to pay for your Donkey Kong Country strategy guide?
If I ever write a game FAQ, it's going to end with "if you figure out a way to make a profit off of this, you are legally required to let me know how you did it so I can congratulate you."
People buy crappy "game guides" all the time. How easy would it be not to even pay a bad author, but just scrape the internet and use it without attribution?
It makes for an interesting thought about what is intrinsically valuable versus what isn't.
The diary is 'non-intrinsic' because he doesn't have the context in which the information makes sense. A series of usernames and passwords is secret because it is self referentially useful.
Stuff in the first category can become useful over time (the Mosaic effect) when someone suddenly lashes out about something and that connects the context of a series of family dramas. Stuff in the latter category is useful right away.
Its useful to think about both cases. (oh and I really enjoyed reading through the ideas, they are fun) I should put my list up somewhere as well.
I've had this going for a year or two now. It's hard to come up with ideas when you want them, and they seem to come to you quickly when you don't need them or once you've started paying attention to problems. By no means is my list complete or good, but I've found it helpful to write them down otherwise I'll forget them.
There's an old joke: so this guy is trying to get rid of an ugly old sofa, he puts it out on the curb with the sign "free sofa!". Days pass; no luck. So he puts up a new sign saying "sofa: $50, call ###-####" and it's gone in ten minutes.
The important part missing here is that it must be a choice. If I want my location data public I can make it public. If I want my super-secret diary read by anyone I can post it on Tumblr.
But if I don't want to no-one should judge me for making that choice. And I should not judge those that choose differently.
This is consistent with what I see about supposed corporate secrets, and source code. What's on paper matters less than the people behind it, their interest and motivation, and how creating the "secrets" changed them.
It is only meaningless to others until they choose to abuse it and use it to put you at a disadvantage. That is when this argument fails.
Yes my code is probably useless to others and so are my super-super secret diaries. However, it is only a matter of time that a smart con-man will connect the dots to ruin my life - my relationships, steal my identity etc.
"Going through my stuff... if they become upset, its their problem, not mine!". Right, until I realize that going through that stuff actually made them happy instead because of how they could use it to profit themselves.
I can't even imagine about what privacy is going to look like in 20 years, or how society will adapt to deal with it. What seems missing from his thought experiment is how to address privacy for things that concern more than just a single participant.
I don't particularly worry about my individual privacy, or care about securing my things. If someone managed to get a hold of my email, I wouldn't be very put out. I don't encrypt my hard drives, or even back anything up. My lack of security and privacy hygiene, however, doesn't extend to my work stuff. I care about maintaining the confidentiality and privacy of that stuff because it's part of a social contract (and I suppose also an employment contract) that I have with my work and my clients.
Instead of his diary example, what if he had asked his friend "Can I copy all of the emails off of your phone, or all the phone numbers in your addressbook?" Maybe they still wouldn't care, or maybe they'd now have to take into account the fact that all that data also involves other people, and maybe they wouldn't find it acceptable for you to give our their cell phone number to anybody who asks.
So much of the data that we accrue is increasingly more interconnected with other people. I feel like that's where we run into trouble, because there is no universal consensus around what's private and what isn't. We have rudimentary laws protecting the smallest subset of data which the government has decided should be considered private, but everything else is a value judgement for individuals (and is part of the current internet company land-grab).
I feel like his position is going to be harder and harder to maintain, as more and more of the "personal" data he's okay with sharing includes other people's data.
You bring up a very solid point. I've been in situations where I was "forced" to give out information such as my conversations with other people, emails, etc. on continuous basis. Although it had nothing to do with work or to a professional level, even on a personal level, that type of information, to me, was private between me and the people I communicate with.
With society heading more towards social media, connections, and networking. Holding secrets seem to be pretty difficult.
If someone were to ask me to tell them a secret, I wouldn't even know what to say. It seems like all aspects of my life is already known by one person or another, or maybe it's so secret that I don't even remember it myself.
This is an interesting point, I think the tendency of most people who are creative/idea types (myself included) are kind of an over thinking of their own ideas, like they are somehow more important and prone to "theft", but the more I work on my own stuff, and the more I do on in open source, the less and less I think that’s the case.
Like when I was working on Capsulr (http://capsulr.com/, shameless plug), I worried about showing people stuff too early, until I just realized that most people probably wouldn’t even see the site, or if they did, most wouldn't even see the product the same way that I see it evolving. It’s kind of helped me to start documenting my work, and I find that sharing notes publicly (just with myself) is a load of pressure off my shoulders and is worth the tiny possibility that someone might take it and run with it.
"We got two ciders and she patiently waited while I spent 20 minutes reading through it. Pages filled with words about processing family drama, formulating goals, plans for life changes, romantic details, lists of regrets, contemplations, etc."
"I was surprised it was all meaningless to me. These pages meant the world to her, but to me they meant no more than any non-secret conversation we’d ever had. It was the same stuff that we all think."
The key here is "meaningless to me". It's obviously meaningful to her. And it would also be meaningful to her family, or romantic partners, or a potential employer, etc.
Privacy is contextual. I often joke that it wouldn't bother me personally if Google or the NSA poked around my e-mail. But it would bother me a lot if my mom did.
This is mostly how i feel about it. With the addition that, there's a big difference between a friend asking to read your diary (who, we'll note, was not in the diary, as he pointed out) and a friend (or anybody) asking to distribute your diary to the public. I think that's the main thing most other people are commenting on as well. There are many levels of private and making something public is not the same as making it publicly accessible.
Yes it's a silly, flippant response by the OP. What if sivers.org posted her diaries for HackerNews to read?
I bet you could find people for which her diaries would not be "meaningless" and could make this person not feel happy about that information being known here. Here, we can make someone like Nelson Mandela seem horrible, just think how would we could make this women feel.
You don't have to get out dystopian examples of why this view is basically stupid. It doesn't stand up to common sense.
I think you could also ask the opposite question about pretty much anything - why was this public? And I think the answer is the same - because I wanted it that way. Why should it need to be justified either way? If I want to keep something secret for a reason or by default or just on a whim, I should be able to, and if I want to make something public, I should be able to do that too. I don't think one choice is any better than the other as a default.
When you live in a society where anything you do or say (or accidentally appear to have said or did) will be held against you, privacy matters. It matters so much you don't log-in to online messaging services because you're wary of SSL MitM attacks or send non-encrypted emails from that network or do a litany of other "normal" things. It definitely means you aren't 100% open like Sivers is suggesting.
How do I know this? I live in a very small, strict university setting that presents a picture of the potential of a future of "complete transparency". Even the hint of "lawbreaking" (i.e., rule-breaking) can land you in serious trouble. Trust me, I take privacy very seriously. Not because I have something to hide, but because I have everything (in the short-term) to lose.
I know what I've said is mostly anecdotal due to the implicit nature of choosing to be in this environment; however, were this environment the world at large, I believe my anecdote would be normative.
Since you've shared that anecdote, may I ask why you chose to go to such a university? I'm guessing it's probably a religious university (don't know of any non-religious schools with such strictures). Was it for spiritual reasons, or for financial reasons?
Personal question, obviously, so feel free to tell me to shove off, but I'm very curious how intelligent people make these decisions.
I'd be happy to discuss those personal decisions in a private setting (email me, if you wish, it's on my profile). I don't think a public discussion will yield much benefit.
Also, I would argue military academies have such demands upon the person.
It's also related the other way - if everything you do or say is public, it won't be held against you. Noone cares about your sexual kinks or comic tastes, if everyone knows about the even weirder issues of the president and all the congressmen.
Perhaps not in the greater world. However, the only way what you're suggesting would work in my anecdotal world is if everyone was 100% open (civil disobedience). That won't happen without a significant critical mass of people; people are, in general, sheep and cowards.
Except that your parents' ultra-conservative church tells them what you're doing is wrong. And while your parents don't care if the politicians all go to hell, they definitely care if you do. Which means there's far less annoying family drama if you just keep it quiet.
Is Sivers really suggesting that just because she was OK with him reading the diary, she would be OK with anyone reading it? That seems like a highly naive assumption.
And seriously, this is your entire project list? "Everything is listed..." As a programmer and someone who sees how other programmers work, I am not buying it.
Please don't lecture us on secrets with weak false examples. It comes off as disingenuous.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 231 ms ] threadAnd then, there are things like: http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/charlotte-laws-hunte...
It's all fine until you wind up on some sort of watchlist because of something "someone" found, and then travelling by air is a nightmare.
I'm not sure why, exactly, we decided that people we don't like but we can't pin any crimes on are punished by having limited access to air travel, but that's how it is!
On a related and more personal note, I once got in a large amount of trouble for a slashdot post. The company I worked for found a post I wrote when I wasn't an employee discussing social engineering attacks on building security(not theirs, mind you, but general ones). This led to some very tense discussions where I was accused of being a hacker, not caring about security, and plenty of other things. My personal (though public) livejournal came to the discussion, too. It was to the point where, if they tried to haul me in again, I would have requested an attorney.
It ultimately blew over and was recognized for what it was; Corporate Security trying to justify the money they spent on data mining. But it was a very tense period.
After that incident I keep things a lot less public.
I wouldn't stay for a company that shows such contempt for its employees and such incompetent waste of everybody's time.
If he was really interested in such ideas, he would know and use GPL/AGPL/MIT/Apache licences already for his code, and CC for his writings.
Instead he makes everyone hippy dippy stupid about secrecy and privacy. It might all be fine when you are rich, cis-straight and white, but a single non friendly idea and you are a threat to the state.
People that cheapen our privacy and secrecy rights shouldn't be allowed this much airtime.
Ridiculous. -1
Yet that is the conclusion he comes to.
The other possible conclusion, as I noted, is that he has previously been unaware of Free/Open Source and Creative Commons based licenses. In which case he needs not talk on secrets but rather on licensing.
And given that Derek has code licensed under MIT, your conclusion that he was unaware of that license is obviously incorrect.
Being openly gay in the 1940-50's in some places in the US may very well have been a death-sentence. Those people would have been wise to keep their sexuality private (or move somewhere a bit more progressive). Likewise today, you wouldn't have to look too hard to find countries where people have to hide their true beliefs from repressive governments or society out of a justified fear of harm.
What I think the commenter meant to say was that the blog author is a member of (I assume) a privileged class in (again, I assume) a privileged society. The public/open lifestyle he suggests might be a worth-while pursuit for others in a similar position as he, but it may very well be foolish for those less fortunate. Context matters.
There's certainly a large amount of people prejudiced and powerful enough to harm those who don't fit their worldviews, but be careful, too, to not let cynicism taint your views or you might become a bit like them.[1]
Derek's post tells a personal anecdote, but the conclusion has a business angle: "I wanted to challenge that fear that someone is going to steal our ideas."
Sometimes you're hiding a business idea. Sometimes you're hiding a state secret, or keeping a state from discovering a secret. However, most of the time, we're hiding personal secrets about our lifestyles because society doesn't like them.
Since you mentioned "cis-straight", I think Derek's argument is in the same vein as the advice given to LGBT children: do not try to be someone else just because some people don't accept what you are. Be yourself and be proud, or at least comfortable.
[1]: You're right about the state or another powerful entity going after people who are somehow unsettling them. My question is: is it better, in the long run, to hide and stay silent, or to stand up and be heard by the rest of society?
Uh - yeah this is completely naive. Here is why; the informatin is meaningless to you only if you are not looking to manipulate, exploit, blackmail or have the upper hand of the person holding the secrets.
This is why the dragnet is insidious. Because it may be insignificant to the rural farmer; but valuable aagainst the urban lawyer seeking office, the corp exec or other heeled/monied power wielders...
He's talking about individuals willfully releasing information, not some secret government program to collect all your personal data that has ever been on the Internet.
He, as I quoted, notes that this information in the super-super private diary was not only provided to him for perusal over cider, but that it was nothing that was of interest to him.
This is a ridiculous statement, to me, on several levels. To illustrate, please provide me the email address of the friend with the super-super private diary; I would like to ask anonymously over the internet to be afforded the same luxury of reading this material. Do you think my request would be agreed to? No, this guy had a personal relationship with this diary author, however intimate/or not, but it was a personal relationship none-the-less.
The idea here is that there is private information that one should have private from anyone - but will choose to share it with those in their intimate circles. This is not the same as saying "Why is anything that is factual secret" and thus who cares if it gets read by some anonymous entity that may or may not have any vested interest in knowing my secrets.
-- Often attributed to Cardinal Richelieu
Or rather, instead of meaning "everybody is guilty of something", I interpret the message as warning about the dangers of relying on a quote taken out of context.
It's not a concerned person's warning, it's a gloating celebration of ruthlessness, of power, and of the inconsequentiality of facts. It's bragging.
If your every statement is recorded, it will be possible to find something in that record to make trouble for you, should powerful parties feel the need. "Guilt" and "innocence" are, in this context, meaningless abstractions.
Given current events though, I can't help but wonder if there's a subtext about privacy and snooping. If so, then I would venture this observation: Your friend's super-secret diary is meaningless to you only because you have no desire to abuse the access you've been given. Suppose instead your friend's devious enemy obtained the diary. Then, he could probably use it to damage your friend's relationships and/or career.
Now imagine a dystopian future when all such diaries are available to a privileged subset of society. Imagine the power that subset would hold, and all the ways it would likely be abused.
Unless we want to ensure our every communication and personal note is fit for public consumption, some things are by definition our secrets.
It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine such a world but for it to be viable, society would have to have very different views on a lot of things.
Maybe the abuser has a car and victim is relying on mass transit. Or maybe the victim's best bet is staying with a friend whose residence is unknown to the abuser.
The problem with open information is that those with evil intent can take precautions to ensure their activities aren't monitored.
Assuming most people on HN are good programmers, there is clearly no linkage between a person's ability to write RoR code and how to reason about normal things in the world. I'm just being honest.
I think what the author is trying to say is that if you live an open life with few secrets, then your life will be less stressful. He's encouraging us to really reevaluate what we keep secret b/c when you sit down to think about it, it's most likely all in your head.
It could also mean reevaluating what you've made public, and deciding what should be secret.
> It could also mean reevaluating what you've made public, and deciding what should be secret.
aka chilling effect - surely you're not seriously advocating for it?
As far as "enemies trying to ruin lives", it's wonderful that you are so privileged as to even be able to think of that as "contrived", but you would do well to pay attention to other people's situations.
But what about someone with mental health problems? Depression or anxiety? A past drug addiction, or merely alcoholism? A criminal record? How about something as "innocuous" as a drunken one night stand while in a committed relationship? Is it so difficult to imagine how, if widely known, these facts might impact someone's ability to hold down a job, or their relationship with their neighbors?
For other people who do have things they'd rather keep private, it's not just in their head-- it can have a wide variety of implications in your interactions with people & society if it becomes common knowledge. If nothing else people will look at you differently. And a lot of it has happened in the past and is unchangeable, and therefore unactionable in the present.
As truth becomes the norm, the value of lies becomes greater. If you lie constantly your lies have less value, than if you tell truth but lie about important facts.
IMO Truly open society can only be established if faking a signal is impossible. Which I doubt it will ever be.
Good enough for me!
The world doesn't need to know your sexual quirks, or your bank balance, and you shouldn't feel the need to broadcast it.
People I interact with know I have a wife, they don't need to know her favorite lube or position. That is crude and unnecessary, and a society that expects that knowledge and welcomes it with open arms has a major root issue.
Nicely done.
It's one thing to never have been persecuted or discriminated against yourself, but it's not really excusable to be so completely unaware of your own privilege and sheltered life.
You consider yourself part of the 'in' group. I follow all the rules, why would anyone bother me? And that works fine until one day it doesn't. The day that happens you'll get no help from the other people that think the way you do.
"Dystopia" wouldn't seem so contrived to residents of East Germany under the Stasi. We're not speaking in hypotheticals. There is precedent for societies using the available technology to erode privacy as much as possible.
"Enemies trying to ruin lives" wouldn't seem so contrived to some people who've had abusive, stalker exes. Read about some of the things people do for personal vendettas. It may not have happened to you, but it probably happened to somebody you know.
"I think what the author is trying to say is that if you live an open life with few secrets, then your life will be less stressful." Until someone unexpectedly uses your personal information to materially harm your well-being. Then your life becomes much more stressful.
Surely that power comes not from the honesty of the words in the diary, but from the fear that those words become widely known. Do most people have something to hide that is so shameful, so damning? In many cases is secrecy a luxury we might quickly be happy not to have? Is this current need for privacy because society is less accepting of us as people? Perhaps our obsession with privacy is the problem, not the solution.
Have you ever complained to a friend or family member about your boss? Then the answer is yes.
Have you ever said something really embarrassingly politically incorrect? Then the answer is yes.
Have you ever possessed an illegal drug, including alcohol while underage? Then the answer is yes.
Doesn't this address your attempt at a point? He has some things which he realized he kept private for no reason so he opened them up. The content of peeps is, in fact, not his to share (if I gave you my phone # to contact me, I would not consider it reasonable, without foreknowledge, for you to dump it into a public DB).
If I ever write a game FAQ, it's going to end with "if you figure out a way to make a profit off of this, you are legally required to let me know how you did it so I can congratulate you."
That said those disclaimers offer no more power than a faq without a disclaimer.
The diary is 'non-intrinsic' because he doesn't have the context in which the information makes sense. A series of usernames and passwords is secret because it is self referentially useful.
Stuff in the first category can become useful over time (the Mosaic effect) when someone suddenly lashes out about something and that connects the context of a series of family dramas. Stuff in the latter category is useful right away.
Its useful to think about both cases. (oh and I really enjoyed reading through the ideas, they are fun) I should put my list up somewhere as well.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pn5vL3TY3VKr3WyZrKBpWnGW...
While this can be true, it isn't entirely reliable.
It's one of the reasons why I think game creators and music creators shouldn't be afraid to take a stand on pricing. What is your time and work worth?
But if I don't want to no-one should judge me for making that choice. And I should not judge those that choose differently.
Yes my code is probably useless to others and so are my super-super secret diaries. However, it is only a matter of time that a smart con-man will connect the dots to ruin my life - my relationships, steal my identity etc.
"Going through my stuff... if they become upset, its their problem, not mine!". Right, until I realize that going through that stuff actually made them happy instead because of how they could use it to profit themselves.
I don't particularly worry about my individual privacy, or care about securing my things. If someone managed to get a hold of my email, I wouldn't be very put out. I don't encrypt my hard drives, or even back anything up. My lack of security and privacy hygiene, however, doesn't extend to my work stuff. I care about maintaining the confidentiality and privacy of that stuff because it's part of a social contract (and I suppose also an employment contract) that I have with my work and my clients.
Instead of his diary example, what if he had asked his friend "Can I copy all of the emails off of your phone, or all the phone numbers in your addressbook?" Maybe they still wouldn't care, or maybe they'd now have to take into account the fact that all that data also involves other people, and maybe they wouldn't find it acceptable for you to give our their cell phone number to anybody who asks.
So much of the data that we accrue is increasingly more interconnected with other people. I feel like that's where we run into trouble, because there is no universal consensus around what's private and what isn't. We have rudimentary laws protecting the smallest subset of data which the government has decided should be considered private, but everything else is a value judgement for individuals (and is part of the current internet company land-grab).
I feel like his position is going to be harder and harder to maintain, as more and more of the "personal" data he's okay with sharing includes other people's data.
You might like the book "The Light of Other Days"!
We live in "luxurious" times as it pertains to what we consider privacy today.
With society heading more towards social media, connections, and networking. Holding secrets seem to be pretty difficult.
If someone were to ask me to tell them a secret, I wouldn't even know what to say. It seems like all aspects of my life is already known by one person or another, or maybe it's so secret that I don't even remember it myself.
I wonder if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Like when I was working on Capsulr (http://capsulr.com/, shameless plug), I worried about showing people stuff too early, until I just realized that most people probably wouldn’t even see the site, or if they did, most wouldn't even see the product the same way that I see it evolving. It’s kind of helped me to start documenting my work, and I find that sharing notes publicly (just with myself) is a load of pressure off my shoulders and is worth the tiny possibility that someone might take it and run with it.
"I was surprised it was all meaningless to me. These pages meant the world to her, but to me they meant no more than any non-secret conversation we’d ever had. It was the same stuff that we all think."
The key here is "meaningless to me". It's obviously meaningful to her. And it would also be meaningful to her family, or romantic partners, or a potential employer, etc.
Privacy is contextual. I often joke that it wouldn't bother me personally if Google or the NSA poked around my e-mail. But it would bother me a lot if my mom did.
I bet you could find people for which her diaries would not be "meaningless" and could make this person not feel happy about that information being known here. Here, we can make someone like Nelson Mandela seem horrible, just think how would we could make this women feel.
You don't have to get out dystopian examples of why this view is basically stupid. It doesn't stand up to common sense.
How do I know this? I live in a very small, strict university setting that presents a picture of the potential of a future of "complete transparency". Even the hint of "lawbreaking" (i.e., rule-breaking) can land you in serious trouble. Trust me, I take privacy very seriously. Not because I have something to hide, but because I have everything (in the short-term) to lose.
I know what I've said is mostly anecdotal due to the implicit nature of choosing to be in this environment; however, were this environment the world at large, I believe my anecdote would be normative.
Personal question, obviously, so feel free to tell me to shove off, but I'm very curious how intelligent people make these decisions.
Also, I would argue military academies have such demands upon the person.
And seriously, this is your entire project list? "Everything is listed..." As a programmer and someone who sees how other programmers work, I am not buying it.
Please don't lecture us on secrets with weak false examples. It comes off as disingenuous.
I wish my list would grow past 0 items.
I honestly have no itches to scratch.
> I honestly have no itches to scratch.
Looks like you do have an itch to scratch...though I can't think of any good solutions to wishing for more projects.