Meanwhile, objective reality doesn't actually care about anyone's opinions.
Not so fast…
In 1966 sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann wrote The Social Construction of Reality. They asked, how do institutions actually arise? If an institution is essentially just a collection of interacting individuals, how do they come to appear as “given, unalterable or self-evident”? Berger and Luckmann argued that the objective reality of society, (i.e.,Durkheim’s “social facts”), is created by humans and human interaction, through a process of habitualization. If society and its institutions seem to be objective social facts that exist externally to individuals, they become that way through an ongoing process of creation and forgetting. Habitualization describes how “any action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be … performed again in the future in the same manner and with the same economical effort” (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Not only do people construct their own society, but they accept it as it is because others have created it before them. Society is, in fact, “habit.”
Offline identity, medical conditions, sexual orientation, relationship problems, and so on.
If they're completely out of the blue (not related to any posts) or I have a preexisting negative relationship with the person they might constitute harassment in which case there's less of an obligation not to pass them on.
To me, anything I consider private is any word, sentence or paragraph I have written.
Going back to the OP of the other thread, while the actual body of the PM was not shared, the naming of the individual was. I would have felt better with words to the effect: "It has been brought to my attention that what I may have written could have been considered a personal attack." No name needed to have been mentioned. A short explanation could follow, and life could have gone on. For me, the line was crossed when a name/avatar/AKA was shared.
To me, anything I consider private is any word, sentence or paragraph I have written.
Surely you don’t mean that? If it were the case that any word, sentence or paragraph you’ve written would be private, then your posts in this thread would “private.”
Can we at least all agree that if someone pms me with private details, I ought not to then pass on those private details by pm to another shipmate or a host with those private details unless there is some overriding justification to do so?
That seems to me an important point, which is being lost in the way the question is being framed.
@pease, if you’re going to make your argument simply by dumping a big quote, could you at least please identify the source from which you’re quoting?
Apologies. It was on The Social Construction of Reality by Janice Aurini. The idea of the objective reality of this place being created by an ongoing process of creation and forgetting, of it being “habit”, seemed apposite in response to RooK's post.
And I don't think your previous question about my "position" is unreasonable, but I haven't as yet thought of anything that I haven't already said.
And I don't think your previous question about my "position" is unreasonable, but I haven't as yet thought of anything that I haven't already said.
The thing is, all you’ve already said has left me confused as to exactly what your position is. I was hoping that a simple sentence or two would clear my confusion.
@Doublethink, I searched the 2002 hosting and admin manuals saved deep in the bowels of my computer, and there is no discussion of private messages in them. I don't have anything later -- I deleted a lot of stuff when GDPR went through.
@Bullfrog, @Dafyd: what constitutes an "overriding justification"? What happens if the recipient thinks they have such a justification and the sender disagrees?
@Doublethink, I searched the 2002 hosting and admin manuals saved deep in the bowels of my computer, and there is no discussion of private messages in them. I don't have anything later -- I deleted a lot of stuff when GDPR went through.
@Bullfrog, @Dafyd: what constitutes an "overriding justification"? What happens if the recipient thinks they have such a justification and the sender disagrees?
That's an excellent question, and I think I was personally shying away from it because I'm not sure I'm qualified to say exactly where the line is.
Verbal abuse or evidence of harm is one big one. If you think the sender is somehow injuring themself or yourself, that's a pretty clear alarm.
Figuring out a good definition of "harm" is probably the next challenge. And I think in general I would trust the hosts to be responsible with handling these matters with confidentiality. I would also hope that shipmates have enough sense not to put anything that sensitive or potentially harmful onto the ship without being aware of what they were doing.
Can we at least all agree that if someone pms me with private details, I ought not to then pass on those private details by pm to another shipmate or a host with those private details unless there is some overriding justification to do so?
That seems to me an important point, which is being lost in the way the question is being framed.
Offline identity, medical conditions, sexual orientation, relationship problems, and so on.
If they're completely out of the blue (not related to any posts) or I have a preexisting negative relationship with the person they might constitute harassment in which case there's less of an obligation not to pass them on.
In data privacy terms (ie GDPR), what you're talking about is "personal data" and some of it is "special category" personal data.
In a personal capacity, what you do with some else's personal data is outside the scope of GDPR, but if you're acting for the service provider (ie in your capacity as a Host or Admin), you're expected to comply with GDPR. And in this regard, making another person's personal data public is a big no-no. Passing personal data on to an appropriate authority is not the same as making it public. The nature of your relationship with that person is not relevant. (Although it does affect other aspects of what a data controller is required to do.)
And I don't think your previous question about my "position" is unreasonable, but I haven't as yet thought of anything that I haven't already said.
The thing is, all you’ve already said has left me confused as to exactly what your position is. I was hoping that a simple sentence or two would clear my confusion.
I think I'd go back to what I wrote back at the start - there are a number of options for dealing with receiving an inappropriate or troubling PM that don't involve posting about it in Styx.
At this end of the discussion, I'd say that if you opt for dealing with it by posting a thread in Styx, be prepared to justify your actions.
Conversely, for the sender of PMs: if you send someone an unsolicited PM that could be viewed as being inappropriate, don't count on them keeping it to themselves.
: what constitutes an "overriding justification"? What happens if the recipient thinks they have such a justification and the sender disagrees?
Pretty much what Bullfrog has said. Harm, including emotional distress, to myself, the Ship, other posters, the original poster.
If the recipient thinks they have a justification and the sender disagrees, then that's a tricky ethical judgement. If the communication was unsolicited then the sender took the risk.
In terms of the risk, one thing I keep in mind is that the legal risk in relation to copyright, defamation or privacy law is likely to be increased by making something public (by posting about it in Styx) compared to just communicating it to one or more individuals by PM.
However, in the case of harm and abuse, I would expect the distinction between public and private to be less significant. (For one thing, abuse generally falls within the remit of criminal law.)
I think that trying to define harm, or whether harm is intended, is likely to be opening a very large can of worms, if the aim is to come up with a set of directives that can be applied here on the forums.
Unless I'm missing something, saying "username told me x" which paraphrases a view expressed in a "private message" is not covered by GDPR. If it isn't about personal data opinion or quoting someone else) that's nothing to do with anything under discussion.
Personal data is many things, but saying "Auntie Maisie dislikes my ties" isn't it.
Unless I'm missing something, saying "username told me x" which paraphrases a view expressed in a "private message" is not covered by GDPR. If it isn't about personal data opinion or quoting someone else) that's nothing to do with anything under discussion.
Opinions can be personal data, religious and political views are actually special category data.
Unless I'm missing something, saying "username told me x" which paraphrases a view expressed in a "private message" is not covered by GDPR. If it isn't about personal data opinion or quoting someone else) that's nothing to do with anything under discussion.
Opinions can be personal data, religious and political views are actually special category data.
I think if you imagine disclosure of a disagreement with another poster about tone falls within the protections of "religious or philosophical beliefs" then you are stretching that to include practically everything. Including abusive messages.
And I don't think your previous question about my "position" is unreasonable, but I haven't as yet thought of anything that I haven't already said.
The thing is, all you’ve already said has left me confused as to exactly what your position is. I was hoping that a simple sentence or two would clear my confusion.
I think I'd go back to what I wrote back at the start - there are a number of options for dealing with receiving an inappropriate or troubling PM that don't involve posting about it in Styx.
At this end of the discussion, I'd say that if you opt for dealing with it by posting a thread in Styx, be prepared to justify your actions.
Conversely, for the sender of PMs: if you send someone an unsolicited PM that could be viewed as being inappropriate, don't count on them keeping it to themselves.
Thank you, @pease. I would agree with all of that.
This might be a discussion of the reasonable range of caution in dealing with personal information. At what point does it become paranoia?
I'm not sure I'd draw the curtain as tightly as @pease would, but I do agree that a curtain is a useful thing to have. I also am not sure that this needs to be a policy concern (unless it keeps coming up) but if it did, a tighter curtain is probably safer for the purpose of risk-avoidance.
A lot of this can fall under "don't be a jerk." There's a certain range of goodwill and grace in people and the particular situation that inspired this thread seems - to me - to fall under that. It was a faux pas, not something that needs to be escalated into the equivalent of a legal dispute. I don't see any blood on the ground, figuratively speaking, though I do see the potential for blood if people acted maliciously. Privacy is a serious matter.
If situations like this were to keep occurring, or if we had a more grievous case of PM abuse, then perhaps there would be a need to make a policy decision out of it, and I think I would agree that "if you have an issue with a PM, keep it confidential by taking it to an appropriate host or admin" is preferable to starting a Styx thread.
That said, we all know that being a host or admin is a lot of work, and do we really want to dump more work on these unpaid volunteers, one of whom is my spouse.
It's an interesting question. I do not presume to have a solid answer. But that's my sense of it.
Unless I'm missing something, saying "username told me x" which paraphrases a view expressed in a "private message" is not covered by GDPR. If it isn't about personal data opinion or quoting someone else) that's nothing to do with anything under discussion.
Opinions can be personal data, religious and political views are actually special category data.
I think if you imagine disclosure of a disagreement with another poster about tone falls within the protections of "religious or philosophical beliefs" then you are stretching that to include practically everything. Including abusive messages.
There's a reason I said "can be" not "are". Personal data is a minefield.
Regarding curtains, it might not be the case that millions of people care about what we're saying, but it is the case that millions of people can see what we're saying. These forums exist, in part, that we may be seen.
In the above, I don't think it matters whether the numbers are hundreds, thousands or millions - our social habits have not had time to adjust to such an unknown, unseen gaze.
Regarding curtains, it might not be the case that millions of people care about what we're saying, but it is the case that millions of people can see what we're saying. These forums exist, in part, that we may be seen.
In the above, I don't think it matters whether the numbers are hundreds, thousands or millions - our social habits have not had time to adjust to such an unknown, unseen gaze.
I think I've always figured that "privacy on the internet is an illusion" and just taken that in stride.
Whatever I post here might be public fodder. And I have posted things I regard as somewhat sensitive and deeply personal. At the same time, being a private person of no real importance, I strain to think why anyone would think my online blatherings were worthy of such attention.
In that case, I am protected by my own perhaps-exaggerated humility.
I think I've always figured that "privacy on the internet is an illusion" and just taken that in stride.
Is privacy online any more of an illusion that privacy offline? I suppose part of what I'm wondering is whether it's because you can't see it online, or because it isn't very clear how it works online, or maybe what the purpose is of online privacy (in the minds of the people who implemented it).
Whatever I post here might be public fodder. And I have posted things I regard as somewhat sensitive and deeply personal. At the same time, being a private person of no real importance, I strain to think why anyone would think my online blatherings were worthy of such attention.
Yet, returning to the quote at the top of this page, somehow all our individual personal blather can be collectively combined to construct some kind of social reality.
In that case, I am protected by my own perhaps-exaggerated humility.
I think I get what you're saying, but I find it difficult to relate to the word "protected" in this context.
Meanwhile, objective reality doesn't actually care about anyone's opinions.
Not so fast…
...The Social Construction of Reality. ...
I rather thought that the whole point of their asserting the function of habitation means that apriori declarations of "social facts" were essentially subjective. The objective aspects boil down to division of labour and the symbolic representations paraded as reality.
Nice try, though. Still not going to post in Purgatory, where this should be. Kudos to those describing IF-THEN functional considerations for both senders and recipients of direct not-necessarily-private messages.
I think a useful principle is that rights in general exist in tension with each other, and that none is absolute. If you say something to someone in a PM or at all, it is protected up to some point.
Privacy offline is less illusory because you can't tell me what I just told @Gwai IRL, or any other things that we do together. There's no record of it anywhere except in our shared memory, which is fallible. Most of our lived meat-lives don't leave written records like our online lives do, thank goodness!
Cell phones can corrupt that by degrees, but I think there is still considerable play in meatspace for privacy, especially if you turn off the damned things when you really need to.
Agreed on social reality, that is very much a thing. But I'd be rather weirdly flattered if some weirdo out there were trying to track down all of my posts to play some weird social game with my life. I can think of things that would be...odd...if they got outed to particular people because I have talked about some personal stuff here. But it would take a very peculiar kind of researcher to figure all of that out. And...to what profit?
You're right, "protected" isn't exactly the best word for it. It's a sense that I keep myself low in importance and therefore I am not very bothered if someone went around outing information they gleaned from my behavior here on the ship, or my PM's. And I do - I think - try to keep my social behavior in PM and in public such that anything I say would not be unreasonably embarrassing. That's the kind of behavior that I was taught even as a child to stick to online.
The internet is a world with paper walls. Protect yourself by being reasonably respectful to everyone - insofar as you can - at all times. So that way, if someone quotes you, you can easily explain yourself and minimize the embarrassment.
On the other hand, dealing with obviously sensitive personal information, the person doing the outing is clearly being antisocial. To some extent, if we are in community, we need to expose ourselves to that vulnerability to function as a community and not barricade ourselves up behind rules and barriers. Sometimes this does require us getting hurt. That happens. That's the cost of genuine human interaction, in my experience. I learned all about that growing up.
Outing someone's private information - in a serious way - is a jerk move. If someone were to, say, take a PM in which I talked about a difficult relationship in my own family and outed it at random for malice, that's on them. In that case, I would trust the community to recognize a jerk move and protect me versus the jerk. Or if they didn't, then this is not a place I need to be. In that case, I'd leave.
Sometimes I think you really need a certain kind of trust to have a functioning social community. And if you don't have that, then why do you even have a community in the first place? Any one of us could go to "social media" and play with the trolls and chatbots.
Part of the beauty of online communities, I think I learned early on, is that we are all here of our own free will. So if the community tries to hurt me, I can just log off and never come back. I have a meat space life to take care of. This isn't a space I need to be. That's very important.
I think we're sort of in different spaces with this question, and I am (yep, rather post modern) looking at it from different angles.
Thanks, Bullfrog. When I'm working on the server, I'm reminded that beyond the different angles, there are radically different paradigms for what it is that happens here on the forums, and for what "here" is.
On a server, everything is just data. That there are human beings "behind" the data is primarily relevant in that a single human is a potential unit or entity that can be used to correlate data capture, measurement and analysis. In this respect, human beings, in themselves, are typically of interest to the extent that they can be exploited in some way - say for financial or political gain.
What the word "social" in social media reveals is the potential for exploitation of the social nature of human beings - their need to be social. Human beings have a remarkable ability to imbue the contexts and media in which they interact with social meaning. It's the human habit of being social, of being able to construct social reality, that enables the novel medium of the online world (still only a couple of generations old) to be widely experienced as being social.
Sometimes I think you really need a certain kind of trust to have a functioning social community. And if you don't have that, then why do you even have a community in the first place? Any one of us could go to "social media" and play with the trolls and chatbots.
Part of the beauty of online communities, I think I learned early on, is that we are all here of our own free will. So if the community tries to hurt me, I can just log off and never come back. I have a meat space life to take care of. This isn't a space I need to be. That's very important.
I take a different view. Engagement in online community is a collective socio-political act. It is an expression and assertion (or affirmation) of human-ness.
Yeah, the data manipulation angle is a thing. I just figure that the ship is a small enough place on the internet, and I am a small enough player even here, that I don't worry so much here about people trying to draw my data out for manipulation or gain. That's what I think of as the protection of being humble. I am extravagantly unimportant in the scheme of things. I can imagine someone who was sufficiently determined doing some relationship damage by tracking down very specific people in very specific ways based on things I've posted here, but it would be a somewhat crazy investment of effort. I don't think I have any enemies of such scale, and I just can't afford to live under that kind of social paranoia.
I barely even qualify as a foot soldier in any political wars here in the USA, let alone global politics. I'm mostly a potential victim.
And I do agree with the assertion and affirmation of human-ness here, in all of its terror and beauty. I'm definitely learning stuff here, and exploring things. I think per Bonhoeffer there is a tension between individual and collective that goes on. I've historically been more collectivist and have been relatively recently snapping more into myself and being less community-obsessed, which I think is a good thing, though it has made me a little odd at times.
Comments
To me, anything I consider private is any word, sentence or paragraph I have written.
Going back to the OP of the other thread, while the actual body of the PM was not shared, the naming of the individual was. I would have felt better with words to the effect: "It has been brought to my attention that what I may have written could have been considered a personal attack." No name needed to have been mentioned. A short explanation could follow, and life could have gone on. For me, the line was crossed when a name/avatar/AKA was shared.
Surely you don’t mean that? If it were the case that any word, sentence or paragraph you’ve written would be private, then your posts in this thread would “private.”
Sounds good to me.
And I don't think your previous question about my "position" is unreasonable, but I haven't as yet thought of anything that I haven't already said.
And thanks for the citation.
@Bullfrog, @Dafyd: what constitutes an "overriding justification"? What happens if the recipient thinks they have such a justification and the sender disagrees?
That's an excellent question, and I think I was personally shying away from it because I'm not sure I'm qualified to say exactly where the line is.
Verbal abuse or evidence of harm is one big one. If you think the sender is somehow injuring themself or yourself, that's a pretty clear alarm.
Figuring out a good definition of "harm" is probably the next challenge. And I think in general I would trust the hosts to be responsible with handling these matters with confidentiality. I would also hope that shipmates have enough sense not to put anything that sensitive or potentially harmful onto the ship without being aware of what they were doing.
In a personal capacity, what you do with some else's personal data is outside the scope of GDPR, but if you're acting for the service provider (ie in your capacity as a Host or Admin), you're expected to comply with GDPR. And in this regard, making another person's personal data public is a big no-no. Passing personal data on to an appropriate authority is not the same as making it public. The nature of your relationship with that person is not relevant. (Although it does affect other aspects of what a data controller is required to do.)
Also…
I think I'd go back to what I wrote back at the start - there are a number of options for dealing with receiving an inappropriate or troubling PM that don't involve posting about it in Styx.
At this end of the discussion, I'd say that if you opt for dealing with it by posting a thread in Styx, be prepared to justify your actions.
Conversely, for the sender of PMs: if you send someone an unsolicited PM that could be viewed as being inappropriate, don't count on them keeping it to themselves.
If the recipient thinks they have a justification and the sender disagrees, then that's a tricky ethical judgement. If the communication was unsolicited then the sender took the risk.
However, in the case of harm and abuse, I would expect the distinction between public and private to be less significant. (For one thing, abuse generally falls within the remit of criminal law.)
I think that trying to define harm, or whether harm is intended, is likely to be opening a very large can of worms, if the aim is to come up with a set of directives that can be applied here on the forums.
Personal data is many things, but saying "Auntie Maisie dislikes my ties" isn't it.
Opinions can be personal data, religious and political views are actually special category data.
I think if you imagine disclosure of a disagreement with another poster about tone falls within the protections of "religious or philosophical beliefs" then you are stretching that to include practically everything. Including abusive messages.
I'm not sure I'd draw the curtain as tightly as @pease would, but I do agree that a curtain is a useful thing to have. I also am not sure that this needs to be a policy concern (unless it keeps coming up) but if it did, a tighter curtain is probably safer for the purpose of risk-avoidance.
A lot of this can fall under "don't be a jerk." There's a certain range of goodwill and grace in people and the particular situation that inspired this thread seems - to me - to fall under that. It was a faux pas, not something that needs to be escalated into the equivalent of a legal dispute. I don't see any blood on the ground, figuratively speaking, though I do see the potential for blood if people acted maliciously. Privacy is a serious matter.
If situations like this were to keep occurring, or if we had a more grievous case of PM abuse, then perhaps there would be a need to make a policy decision out of it, and I think I would agree that "if you have an issue with a PM, keep it confidential by taking it to an appropriate host or admin" is preferable to starting a Styx thread.
That said, we all know that being a host or admin is a lot of work, and do we really want to dump more work on these unpaid volunteers, one of whom is my spouse.
It's an interesting question. I do not presume to have a solid answer. But that's my sense of it.
There's a reason I said "can be" not "are". Personal data is a minefield.
Regarding curtains, it might not be the case that millions of people care about what we're saying, but it is the case that millions of people can see what we're saying. These forums exist, in part, that we may be seen.
In the above, I don't think it matters whether the numbers are hundreds, thousands or millions - our social habits have not had time to adjust to such an unknown, unseen gaze.
I think I've always figured that "privacy on the internet is an illusion" and just taken that in stride.
Whatever I post here might be public fodder. And I have posted things I regard as somewhat sensitive and deeply personal. At the same time, being a private person of no real importance, I strain to think why anyone would think my online blatherings were worthy of such attention.
In that case, I am protected by my own perhaps-exaggerated humility.
Yet, returning to the quote at the top of this page, somehow all our individual personal blather can be collectively combined to construct some kind of social reality.
I think I get what you're saying, but I find it difficult to relate to the word "protected" in this context.
I rather thought that the whole point of their asserting the function of habitation means that apriori declarations of "social facts" were essentially subjective. The objective aspects boil down to division of labour and the symbolic representations paraded as reality.
Nice try, though. Still not going to post in Purgatory, where this should be. Kudos to those describing IF-THEN functional considerations for both senders and recipients of direct not-necessarily-private messages.
Cell phones can corrupt that by degrees, but I think there is still considerable play in meatspace for privacy, especially if you turn off the damned things when you really need to.
Agreed on social reality, that is very much a thing. But I'd be rather weirdly flattered if some weirdo out there were trying to track down all of my posts to play some weird social game with my life. I can think of things that would be...odd...if they got outed to particular people because I have talked about some personal stuff here. But it would take a very peculiar kind of researcher to figure all of that out. And...to what profit?
You're right, "protected" isn't exactly the best word for it. It's a sense that I keep myself low in importance and therefore I am not very bothered if someone went around outing information they gleaned from my behavior here on the ship, or my PM's. And I do - I think - try to keep my social behavior in PM and in public such that anything I say would not be unreasonably embarrassing. That's the kind of behavior that I was taught even as a child to stick to online.
The internet is a world with paper walls. Protect yourself by being reasonably respectful to everyone - insofar as you can - at all times. So that way, if someone quotes you, you can easily explain yourself and minimize the embarrassment.
On the other hand, dealing with obviously sensitive personal information, the person doing the outing is clearly being antisocial. To some extent, if we are in community, we need to expose ourselves to that vulnerability to function as a community and not barricade ourselves up behind rules and barriers. Sometimes this does require us getting hurt. That happens. That's the cost of genuine human interaction, in my experience. I learned all about that growing up.
Outing someone's private information - in a serious way - is a jerk move. If someone were to, say, take a PM in which I talked about a difficult relationship in my own family and outed it at random for malice, that's on them. In that case, I would trust the community to recognize a jerk move and protect me versus the jerk. Or if they didn't, then this is not a place I need to be. In that case, I'd leave.
Sometimes I think you really need a certain kind of trust to have a functioning social community. And if you don't have that, then why do you even have a community in the first place? Any one of us could go to "social media" and play with the trolls and chatbots.
Part of the beauty of online communities, I think I learned early on, is that we are all here of our own free will. So if the community tries to hurt me, I can just log off and never come back. I have a meat space life to take care of. This isn't a space I need to be. That's very important.
I think we're sort of in different spaces with this question, and I am (yep, rather post modern) looking at it from different angles.
On a server, everything is just data. That there are human beings "behind" the data is primarily relevant in that a single human is a potential unit or entity that can be used to correlate data capture, measurement and analysis. In this respect, human beings, in themselves, are typically of interest to the extent that they can be exploited in some way - say for financial or political gain.
What the word "social" in social media reveals is the potential for exploitation of the social nature of human beings - their need to be social. Human beings have a remarkable ability to imbue the contexts and media in which they interact with social meaning. It's the human habit of being social, of being able to construct social reality, that enables the novel medium of the online world (still only a couple of generations old) to be widely experienced as being social.
I take a different view. Engagement in online community is a collective socio-political act. It is an expression and assertion (or affirmation) of human-ness.
Yeah, the data manipulation angle is a thing. I just figure that the ship is a small enough place on the internet, and I am a small enough player even here, that I don't worry so much here about people trying to draw my data out for manipulation or gain. That's what I think of as the protection of being humble. I am extravagantly unimportant in the scheme of things. I can imagine someone who was sufficiently determined doing some relationship damage by tracking down very specific people in very specific ways based on things I've posted here, but it would be a somewhat crazy investment of effort. I don't think I have any enemies of such scale, and I just can't afford to live under that kind of social paranoia.
I barely even qualify as a foot soldier in any political wars here in the USA, let alone global politics. I'm mostly a potential victim.
And I do agree with the assertion and affirmation of human-ness here, in all of its terror and beauty. I'm definitely learning stuff here, and exploring things. I think per Bonhoeffer there is a tension between individual and collective that goes on. I've historically been more collectivist and have been relatively recently snapping more into myself and being less community-obsessed, which I think is a good thing, though it has made me a little odd at times.