"Not everything that is private is meant to be secret"

March 4, 2024 9:36 AM

From 2003: Danny O'Brien wrote:

...we have conversations in public, in private, and in secret. All three are quite separate. The public is what we say to a crowd; the private is what we chatter amongst ourselves, when free from the demands of the crowd; and the secret is what we keep from everyone but our confidant. Secrecy implies intrigue, implies you have something to hide. Being private doesn’t....There are only two registers on the Net; public and secret.

with further thoughts on implications for conversation and norms.

No matter how constant a person you are, no matter how unwavering your beliefs, something you say in the private register will sound horrific, dismissive, egotistical or trite when blazoned on the front page of the Daily Mirror. This is the context that we are quoted out of.....

On the net, you have public, or you have secrets. The private intermediate sphere, with its careful buffering. is shattered. E-mails are forwarded verbatim. IRC transcripts, with throwaway comments, are preserved forever. You talk to your friends online, you talk to the world.....

There are only two registers on the Net; public and secret. In the public sphere, everything you say is for everyone. Talk in the secret register, and you have something to hide.

And this is what the end of privacy means. It means the end of the private register. Not everything that is private is meant to be secret, meant to be hidden. It’s just not intended to be public. That grey area is fading, and soon it will be gone.

MeFites have brought up this piece when discussing the topic (2022, 2015, also 2015) but I believe no one's ever linked to it in a front page post before.

Disclaimer: I know and am friends with Danny.

posted by brainwane (18 comments total)

Roko's basilisk will punish you for secrets, too
posted by MonsieurPEB at 9:43 AM on March 4 [1 favorite]

An interesting article. I remember the erosion of the private register becoming evident to me in the earlier days of the knitting website Ravelry. It had a pretty robust discussion forum. Registered Ravelry account holders could become members of individual discussion groups (kind of like subreddits), but as long as you had a Ravelry account you could read or post as a guest in any group.

There was a group called Rubberneckers whose members would read other groups’ discussions, and then come back to post about and snark on them, pointing out posts they thought were examples of bad behavior—ridiculous, petty, overly dramatic, or hypocritical.

This is how a lot of people on Ravelry found out that even though they thought they were having a private discussion in their own group, it wasn’t private at all. It existed for other people to find and dissect, often with no regard to context.

Opinion was split on Ravelry about the Rubberneckers group. Some argued that it was harmless, because they kept their discussion limited to their own group, and members were strictly forbidden from participating in the original threads being snarked on. The Rubberneckers argued that the people who were feeling hurt at having their discussions rubberneck had had to purposely go looking to find out they were being snarked on, because Rubberneckers didn’t actively participate in the original threads. They felt they provided a public service of sorts, pointing out hypocrisy and rude behavior, and shining a light on petty Internet squabbles to encourage people to behave better.

Other people argued that rubbernecking was pretty evident to those being rubbernecked, because suddenly there would be a lot of dislike votes on a particular post or thread, sometimes more than all the existing registered group members could’ve contributed. Once people knew about the rubberneckers group, they could check there to see if their group posts were being discussed. There were discussions about whether the Rubberneckers violated the “be excellent to each other” policy. People asked why the rubberneckers should be the arbiters of what was good behaviour on the Internet, and what was petty or overly dramatic.

I had completely forgotten about this, but I think it’s a good illustration of that tension between thinking that there’s privacy on the Internet, and then finding out that whatever you say in writing online can be examined and discussed with no regard for context.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:06 AM on March 4 [20 favorites]

There are only two registers on the Net; public and secret.

This was published twenty years ago, before endpoint-encrypted group chat with ephemeral messages became widely available. That's what I and my online friends routinely use to chatter amongst ourselves when free from the demands of the crowd, and it certainly feels more like privacy than secrecy.

And sure, any participant in a group chat could progressively screenshot the whole thing and blow it all wide open, but I don't see that as fundamentally different from pre-internet versions of takin notes on a criminal fucken conspiracy; it's not the done thing, exactly because privacy isn't dead regardless of how badly the data mining contingent wishes it were.
posted by flabdablet at 10:11 AM on March 4 [5 favorites]

I miss NTK.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 11:32 AM on March 4 [7 favorites]

Over the past several years, the majority of my online discussions have moved into various Slack or Discord instances. (Including for software support, which I find especially annoying, but that's not immediately relevant.)

On the one hand, these forums are closed in the sense that you need a login to access them, and they don't exist in any form that you could link to and share.

On the other hand, none of those forums are actually secret: their existence is publicized, often very widely, and they generally have a low barrier to entry for joining. (In one case, the only hoop you have to jump through is to send an email asking for a login, and literally everyone who asks is admitted.)

On the gripping hand, in most such forums, pervasively screenshotting the discussion and posting it on Twitter would get you banned very quickly! And some of them subscribe to a version of the Chatham House Rule, where you can use any information you learn on the forum, but can never attribute it.

I wonder how these kinds of forums would fit into the public/private/secret taxonomy? They feel to me like an attempt to reinvent the private register, but I need to think about it a bit more.
posted by learning from frequent failure at 12:25 PM on March 4

How many people feel like Metafilter is rubberneckers?
posted by clew at 2:00 PM on March 4 [2 favorites]

The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America is a great book on this from 2001 - so before the internet really took off, but it makes a similar case for the value of privacy as well as a lot of predictions that have, more or less, come true.
posted by subdee at 7:01 PM on March 4 [2 favorites]

You can have a middle ground between totally public and totally secret... a locked livejournal community where mods approve almost all membership requests is one example. Or a discord server that's technically closed by easy to get into (or even public, but obscure). Or your friends of friends circle on Facebook. Or a mastodon instance that only a few people know about. There's plenty of examples, and those are the places where you can really get to know people online, when they're being the version of themselves that's not a performance for the crowd.
posted by subdee at 7:07 PM on March 4 [1 favorite]

This exact issue comes up on Mastodon quite frequently. In response to "reply guys", random strangers who drop into a conversation thread to argue with the OP or other commenters.

You'll regularly see people subtooting "you wouldn't drop into a private conversation between friends in a public place, would you?"

Which, true, but the analogy does not fit. Mastodon threads aren't private conversations, and the common thread between reply guys is that they disagree with the OP.

This analogy to private conversation obscures the more complex problem with reply guys, which is that to some extent, reply guy behaviour is in the eye of the beholder.

To me, what seems to be happening is that people post looking for support and validation, but don't want to admit this even to themselves because they have internalised the toxic idea that needing validation is weak. In this frame of mind, everyone is supposed to read the invisible message that the poster isn't even aware they wrote, "Hey, nothing but affirmation please"

Most humans crave approval from others, there's nothing weak or shameful about it.

But these very same people will happily argue with anyone else they don't agree with online, because *those* people are obviously wrong.

But they're never reply guys in their own eyes.

The thing is, here is such a thing as a toxic reply guy, sea lioning and what abouting is a thing, but it's not as easy to define those as just referring to a rule of etiquette that seems to be common sense, but doesn't really make sense.
posted by Zumbador at 8:45 PM on March 4 [2 favorites]

I do agree with Danny O'Brien to the extent that a lot of people do seem to treat essentially public communication facilities as if they offered actual privacy when they don't, and then get all shocked and upset when the inevitable Reply Guys do start showing up.

But I think the idea that end-to-end encryption is only for keeping secrets is wrong. Back in 2003, e2ee was such a pain in the arse to use that only the most security-conscious would ever bother with it, so I can see how that was a reasonable thing to believe back then. It isn't any more. Signal, Keybase, Whatsapp, Telegram and so forth are now in routine use by literally billions of people, creating huge volumes of private traffic that Reply Guy cannot get access to unless let in by a direct participant.
posted by flabdablet at 9:15 PM on March 4 [2 favorites]

... they're never reply guys in their own eyes.
I think everyone is a reply guy in someone's eyes.

How many people feel like Metafilter is rubberneckers?
I've never thought about it (us) like that but, if the shoe fits ...
posted by dg at 9:33 PM on March 4

I didn't notice this article was written in 2003 until flabdablet pointed it out. No doubt encrypted messaging has changed the landscape somewhat, but I don't think it necessarily challenges the premise that the 'private' part of the equation is at risk of disappearing. While screenshots are hardly a convenient way to create evidence chains of assumed private conversations, they have brought down more than a few politicians over the years, so they're pretty effective when the stakes make the effort worthwhile. If nothing else, they're an effective way of creating "evidence" (I'm always amazed when nobody ever questions the accuracy of screenshots) of what has been said and are much more convenient than recording every conversation you have just in case something juicy gets said.

I'm also not convinced that encrypted messaging systems are as secure as they claim to be, particularly given the ownership of (eg) whatsapp. I would advise anyone using these to assume that everything they pass through those services could see the light of day at some point. Maybe they have all the uncrackable encryption in the world right now, but they're putting a lot of trust in people like Mark Zuckerberg to keep their secrets for them, and in decryption technology not getting better.

What's really changed is not so much that the private space no longer exists, but that that space is no longer as private as it once was. Back in the olden days of speaking to people through our mouths, moving information out of that private space involved remembering exactly what was said and who said it, bringing with it the unreliability of human memory and the defense of 'that's not what I actually said' because it's one person's word against another, with both likely being wrong to some degree. Where this manifests most often is, as others have mentioned, spaces
on the Internet where people assume the conversation is private and equate it to a conversation with mates around the BBQ, not realising that all the neighbours are listening in and taking notes and that the conversation is being recorded and copies made for anyone who wants them. In these spaces, people need to remember that anyone can or could read what they write and it can never, ever be erased. At least, people should act like that.
posted by dg at 10:25 PM on March 4 [1 favorite]

Reading Zumbador's comment, the phrase that comes to mind is "context collapse". We are saying things in one context, which the application's affordances and framing have created for us, and suddenly we are being interpreted in a different context. 90% of Twitter drama used to be exactly this, where people said something all their friends understood and suddenly strangers monstered them by simply taking their tweet as though it were a standalone statement for the world. I believe even if this was accidental, social media platforms have learned that this is a great source of engagement and they quite carefully design so that you can mistake a public space for an intimate one. Hence why their privacy settings are notoriously difficult to use.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:33 PM on March 4 [7 favorites]

Mastodon has some thread-branch-visibility problems that make reply-guying a technical hazard you have to actively work to avoid. It's entirely possible to see only one arm of the conversation, and miss some crucial context that makes you seem like you're condescendingly explaining or pointlessly contrarian. The thing to do when someone calls you out there is to apologise, acknowledge the missing context, and bow out politely.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 4:26 AM on March 5 [1 favorite]

Interestingly, the College Board chose this topic in 2002 for the AP English Language and Composition exam. The prompt was about public and private speech.

They quoted Milan Kundera. For anyone that just wants the quote:

"I wrote about this in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Jan Prochazka, an important figure of the Prague Spring came under heavy surveillance after the Russian invasion of 1968. At the time, he saw a good deal of another great opposition figure, Professor Vaclav Cernv, with whom he liked to drink and talk. All their conversations were secretly recorded, and I suspect the two friends knew it and didn’t give a damn. But one day in 1970 or 1971, with the intent to discredit Prochazka, the police began to broadcast these conversations as a radio serial. For the police it was an audacious, unprecedented act. And, surprisingly: it nearly succeeded; instantly Prochazka was discredited: because in private, a person says all sorts of things, slurs friends, uses coarse language, acts silly, tells dirty jokes, repeats himself, makes a companion laugh by shocking him with outrageous talk, floats heretical ideas he’d never admit in public, and so forth. Of course, we all act like Prochazka, in private we bad mouth our friends and use coarse language; that we act different in private than in public is everyone’s most conspicuous experience, it is the very ground of the life of the individual; curiously, this obvious fact remains unconscious, unacknowledged, forever obscured by lyrical dreams of the transparent glass house, it is rarely understood to be the value one must defend beyond all others. Thus only gradually did people realize (though their rage was all the greater) that the real scandal was not Prochazka’s daring talk but the rape of his life; they realized (as if by electric shock) that private and public are two essentially different worlds and that respect for that difference is the indispensable condition, the sine qua non, for a man to live free; that the curtain separating these two worlds is not to be tampered with, and that curtain-rippers are criminals."
posted by Snowishberlin at 6:11 AM on March 5 [6 favorites]

There must be another category for the all too frequent phenomenon of people subjecting those nearby to one or both halves of what should be a private phone conversation in a public place. “Performative”?

(And surely this happened behind the Iron Curtain too, perhaps slightly less often out of pure self-absorbtion.)
posted by mubba at 7:00 AM on March 5 [1 favorite]

Those subjecting the world to the banalities of their personal phone calls are no different from those moving the details of conversations from private to public spaces. The need to keep private and public separate espoused above in the Milan Kundera quote is not just an obligation imposed on others - it also imposes an obligation on us to keep our own private business private. Not only is it inappropriate for people to share information they obtained from others in a private setting, but it's also inappropriate for us to force the private part of our personality on others.
posted by dg at 3:48 PM on March 5 [1 favorite]

The corollary to this is Quinn Norton's "Over time, all data approaches deleted, or public."
posted by holgate at 10:05 AM on March 25