Matthew (and Neil), hello.
(and being conscious of Neil's implied suggestion that this may be drifting off-topic for the list)
On 9 Feb 2016, at 1:26, Matthew Butterick wrote:
Neil's critique ought not be lightly dismissed.
Oh, I certainly didn't intend to _dismiss_ Neil's critique (and I don't read Jack Firth as doing so either), much less dismiss it lightly.
For me (and this is clearer to me after thinking about Neil's remarks), this is now less of a technical question than a commercial one. The question of whether an organisation has my data seems less salient than the question of what they plan to do with it. If a company says they're not going to exploit my data for money, but it later emerges that they do, then I and a lot of other people/companies will stop using them, and that gives them a direct bet-the-farm interest in being 'honest'. That is, the business model means that I don't have to greatly _trust_ them to be honest actors (with scare-quotes round quite a lot of that).
If there was a service like Slack's which worked without sharing data -- for example, by using end to end encryption or doing everything P2P -- then I would prefer that, all other things being equal. I've almost completely migrated from Dropbox to Tresorit for more or less this reason. So for Slack, it comes down to trade-off, and it seems to me that Slack isn't a bad offender here; Neil noted this, and I find their privacy policy broadly reassuring, to the extent that it seems to contain quite a few hostages to fortune if they were to plan on exploiting the data for money.
More interesting than Slack, though, are Neil's two points that (i) there is now a pervasive expectation that nothing is ephemeral -- everything is logged somewhere; and (ii) that the ubiquity of one or two dotcom business models limits the expectations of students, startups and investors.
Re (i): one could expand this into both a socio-legal privacy point, and an aesthetic or even I'm sure spiritual point about ephemera. That would send us wildly off-topic.
Re (ii): I had not thought of this point, or at least not in such concrete terms; and mulling it over in the last couple of days, it is a very sobering point indeed. Having everyone think the same way is all sorts of nasty, and means that I do now share at least some of Neil's distaste for the situation.
The internet's become a very different place from what it was going to be 20 or 25 years ago. *sigh*
All the best, Norman -- Norman Gray : https://nxg.me.uk SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
