Privacy

I admit to a certain amount of frustration on the subject of privacy lately. It seems, in all aspects of my life, both personal and professional, the new data privacy regulations that the EU rolls out May 25th are a theme in every discussion.

I don’t live in the EU, and I know that the European view on privacy is very different than the American one. Anything I say below is my opinion.

I am also an archivist and librarian by education, if not by profession. We learn about the past by reading the materials of the day. The fact that email is so easy to keep and delete makes things difficult for us to archive for the future. Does the right to privacy mean we lose the ability to look back, because we don’t want to remember?

Historical concerns aside, let’s think about today. In the majority of states in the US, only one party partipating in a phone call is required to record a conversation and even post it. Privacy is very lopsided. There is no such thing as absolute privacy.

For me, keeping a copy of communications I was a party to is perfectly acceptable. My website is where I keep my copy. It is not covered by privacy regulations. I have no business agenda there. I will not sell your data or use it for anything else but archiving that conversation.

The thorny issue is whether or not I have the right to display that information publicly. This is because I am, in some cases, copying that data from another service. For example, Twitter or Facebook. Those services got permission to store that information and you have the right to manage it. But you may not know that I have copied it to ask me to remove the public display of your image.

But how is that different than someone creating a screenshot of the post? Which was public information at the time?

As a private individual, I think it is mandatory that I post a policy about what I do. And that I will hide or remove information on request. As a developer of Indieweb tools, I think I should give people the option to not store information if they so choose.

So, I am going to build the tools for people to not collect data. I am going to stop what I am working on and do some of this right now. But I still will. I am going to try to better secure that data. I am going to be clearer about it. That is the lesson I can take away from this and should. That we need to think about privacy impact.

I hope those who are more concerned about this tell me through my site they don’t want me to share our public conversations that they were happy to put in a public forum. I will then restrict them to my eyes only.

In Indieweb terms, I support webmention deletion. If the original source changes and you send a webmention, my site should remove or update my copy.

Disclosure: Your responses to this may be captured for archival purposes. Please advise me if there is an issue.