Lauda is superlatively trustworthy with
confidential information which she has promised to keep as such. I say this based on my substantial experience with her handling of confidential information. For obvious reasons, I cannot publicly disclose evidence of that experience; nevertheless, I will personally vouch that I would trust her with almost anything.
However, that is irrelevant to her publication of (0) unsolicited, hostile contacts that,
separately and additionally, were (1) made via a communications medium that
explicitly bears no expectation of privacy.
Was it really necessary to post private discussions on public?
PMs are not private—explicitly not “private” messages. On this forum, neither rules nor custom prohibit their publication.Subject: Re: Publicly posting PMsThere is no restriction against it. PM = Personal Message, not Private Message.
Compare "private interview" to "personal interview" or "private locker" to "personal locker". Something private isn't expected to be made public, but something personal is only owned by or associated with a single person, not necessarily with a strong guarantee of privacy.
For my part, I treat unencrypted PMs with the discretion of common courtesy. Likewise, if someone were to publish my unencrypted PMs gratuitously, for petty spite, and/or otherwise without any
good cause or even a colourable reason, then I would consider that to show indiscretion—
i.e., evidence of an untrustworthy character; and depending on the particulars of the circumstance, on a case-by-case basis, I
may issue negative feedback accordingly. Otherwise, I have no illusions about the privacy of unencrypted Personal Messages: I treat them as a sort of one-on-one forum, or an open-door room aside from the main room at a party.
Encrypted communications with explicit bilateral promises of confidentiality are a quite different matter, of course.
Yes. Any attempts, and I do not care by who, of even remote manipulation, coercion, threats and many other things instantly get posted by me.
That is sound “good cause”, per what I stated above.
Yet it doesn't provide any "evidence" so what was the point? Makes me think that the "secret evidence" in other cases, such as Kalemder's, is similarly flimsy to non-existent.
No, this is not a request to publish any more PMs, and not an excuse to blame others for your lapse in judgement.
There you go again. FYI, I
do not communicate with Lauda via unencrypted Personal Messages; and in re Kalemder, no matter what the substance of what I told her, she has no choice but to keep my confidence, unless she were to explicitly betray my trust in her promises.
Stop giving her grief for her more or less quiet refusal to do that! Should you be in the mood to grind an axe on this issue, take it up with me—but please be advised that I am not so kind as Lauda is.
PSA: On personal communications in a panopticonAside from myself, the PMs can be read by the administrators, the datacenter technicians, Cloudflare, and the NSA. They are public as is anyways.
Vide the very first post in my post history!I really don't believe in willingly putting a man-in-the-middle in your HTTPS like this, […]
The security implications are that Cloudflare can read everything you send to or receive from the server, including your cleartext password and any PMs you send or look at.
Thank you, theymos, for honestly disclosing and discussing the facts about Cloudflare.
Anybody who expects
privacy from unencrypted Personal Messages is lamentably misguided. Your unencrypted PMs can be read by many different parties without your knowledge. By close analogy,
are you so stupid as to expect privacy for your unencrypted Gmail, your Facebook messages, your bank records, your credit/debit card purchase records, your tax records, your gold purchases, your phone’s SMS texts and voice calls, your phone’s locational data (including cell tower data) that physically track you as the contemptibly dumb, contentedly grazing tagged livestock that you are, your Google search terms, your Twitter DMs, your Skype calls, anything you say or do in the presence of your “smart” TV, the forms that you happily fill out for advertising gimmicks from companies who want your name, address, and birthday for commercial Big Data purposes, etc., etc., ad maximam nauseam!?*crickets*Sorry. So sorry. Perhaps that was the wrong question, in the sense of
hitting the mark on issues that are more comfortable to ignore:
An evil question. Keep grazing,
grinning idiots happy masses; let not my musings disturb your ovine contentment. Cheers! Please enjoy a refreshment from my sponsors, and remember to
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Ahem...
Man and TechnicsI believe nullius has a more optimistic view of the future than I do. :)
“Optimism is cowardice.” — Spengler (writing most of a hundred years ago)
[...]
I don’t have a television... or a smartphone. Quibbling about etiquette in the personal handling of unencrypted Personal Messages is not seeing the forest for the trees. You are casually chatting in the presence of a telescreen, and then worrying about whether the other party to the conversation may tell others what you said.
Note: PM privacy is not guaranteed. Encrypt sensitive messages.
That was a tangent, but relevant to the absurdity of expectations of privacy for unencrypted Personal Messages.
I now return to the point:
Lauda’s publication of unsolicited contact seeking to persuade, then browbeat her into changing her trust list is not only justifiable, but a positive public service for the good of the forum.The evidence as such speaks for itself; I needn’t write a thousand-word essay thereupon.
