There Is No Future for Online Safety Without Privacy and Security

I’m puzzled by the limited opposition from businesses regarding government attempts to access encrypted communications. Granting governments easy access—which inevitably leads to uncontrolled monitoring—compromises a company’s most valuable asset: its privacy. This would effectively hand over the keys to their operations, exposing them to security breaches, stifling growth potential, limiting access to competitive markets, and ultimately, jeopardizing company ownership. Corrupt officials could exploit this access to manipulate markets, facilitate insider trading, sabotage business plans, and even plant fabricated evidence within company communications and systems, leading to potential takeover and imprisonment of owners.

Before anyone who hasn’t read the actual link reacts to its current title and gets swept up by the single thread that’s dominated the entirety of this submission, it’s an interview.

Alexander Linton of the Session Technology Foundation on building decentralized messaging and why platform-wide content moderation is impractical on encrypted platforms.

Not familiar with him or the platform. But sounds like an interesting exchange.

Today's FTFY: s/Privacy/Anonymity/

Make sure that it's impossible for my online actions to be traced to my identity, and then I don't need privacy, because there is no association that needs to be hidden and protected.

[dead]

Let me be blunt with what I think happened here.

For years, technical people insisted it was the parent’s job to monitor Internet safety. Parents, especially with the advent of social media, hardcore pornography, and every childhood friend having a device, correctly said this was unreasonable and impossible.

Technical people had a chance for two decades to solve this problem on their terms. Instead we collectively decided that anyone articulating this point of view must be a morally panicked maniac, and that this is a problem with “no reasonable solutions” that we would tolerate. Now we don’t get to dictate the terms, because everyone has had enough, and nobody has patience left for kids watching BDSM on their friend’s phones at 12.

Because of our industry’s refusal to take those concerns seriously, we lost our voice, we lost the grounds of sounding reasonable, and the floodgates are now open - for everything. Nobody is listening anymore to our point of view and arguably correctly so.