Week: 18

Map

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.

 

Replied to The Indieweb privacy challenge (Webmentions, silo backfeeds, and the GDPR) by Sebastian Greger (sebastiangreger.net)

Originally intended to showcase a privacy-centred implementation of emerging social web technologies – with the aim to present a solution not initially motivated by legal requirements, but as an example of privacy-aware interaction design – my “social backfeed” design process unveiled intricate challenges for Indieweb sites, both for privacy in general and legal compliance in […]

I have been thinking about this issue a lot. GDPR seems to be everywhere, and I’m not sure that storing information on interactions is a privacy issue, but I want to respect people’s concerns. GDPR or not, I do not think this is a use case the law intended to prevent.

You use the WordPress suite of plugins. And being as I’m as regular contributor, there are a few ideas I’ve floating that I think are a good start, and invite you to contribute more.

  1. Add text to the Webmention form that explains how to use it to delete a mention. Since the form can be used without supporting webmentions on your own site, this is something that should be made clear.
  2. Add Setting to not display avatar/photo
  3. Add ability to edit mentions, to correct inaccurate data.
  4. Add setting to store more/less data.
  5. Add privacy policy to plugin for those who install it and add text/link to webmention form.
  6. Explain how to request a takedown of information.
  7. Periodically poll/refresh sources.
  8. Allow a different level of processing for ‘native’ webmentions vs backfeed run through a service like Bridgy.

This doesn’t solve all of the problems necessarily, but I think these ideas are a good faith effort in that direction.

 

Bookmarked Garry Marshall Dead: ‘Pretty Woman’ Director Was 81 by Carmel Dagan ([object Object])

Garry Marshall, who created some of the 1970s’ most iconic sitcoms including “Happy Days,” “The Odd Couple,” “Laverne and Shirley” and “Mork and Mindy” and went on to direct hit movies including “Pretty Woman” and “The Princess Diaries,” died Tuesday in Burbank, Calif. of complications from pneumonia following a stroke. He was 81. Marshall went from […]

Reposted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h80l4XIPJC4 (youtube.com)
In 1964, Bob Dylan wrote My Back Pages as one of the last songs he composed for “Another Side of Bob Dylan.” The original version was not as popular as the one above, recorded by the Byrds three years later.

The song has been stuck in my head today. With the song, Dylan comments on what he once accepted and now doubts, and to a degree, celebrates where he is now.

Memories

I imported all of my old Livejournal posts from a decade ago into WordPress to store them and purge them from Livejournal. Also appears I accidentally autoposted some of them to Twitter and Facebook. I’ve deleted them, but many of you may have seen them.

Something of a stupid mistake. Many of them were private at the time, and were supposed to come unpublished into the system for review. But, it is also evidence of how I’ve matured over the years, I suppose. You come to the realization of how you felt at different times in your life, which is why I moved the old entries in the first place.

It reminds me of why my sharing on the internet is so limited. Once you say something, you can’t unsay it, or delete it.