from the "i can't believe i have to explain this" department

[jazzfish]

The ability to lock your posts to a subset of your readers creates an expectation, and culture, of privacy. The ability to broadcast comments made in locked posts breaks that expectation and defies the norms of that culture.

Telling people "you shouldn't put anything anywhere on the internet you don't want someone else to read" is blaming the victim. The weaker version, "if you don't trust people not to abuse this then don't friend them," is still blaming the victim. Don't do it.

Comments

[jsciv.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I hope that my comments from yesterday weren't taken as "blaming the victim" as that certainly wasn't my intent. I think we have a reasonable disagreement on what constitutes or breaks the expectation of privacy (though I do think that we both have similar expectations from our friends). By and large I expect we agree that none of our friends would intentionally violate our privacy, though we seem to disagree on what this particular LJ change implies.

Please don't think that I'm not listening: I have thought a lot about your points and I just feel like we don't have the same conclusions on the matter.

As far as telling people "you shouldn't put anything on the internet..." being blaming the victim: I have two responses to that. My first is that I don't think this is just an internet thing. I don't think you should say anything in a public room that you wouldn't want others to hear or that you should tell tales to people you don't feel you can trust. The internet is just the latest medium of communications, to which I think the generic rule of (to borrow a phrase from PAX, going on this very weekend) "don't be a dick" applies.

My second response is that I also accept that mistakes will happen. I accept that sometimes I will say something I shouldn't. That sometimes my trust is misplaced. That sometimes someone will overhear me when I thought I was alone. That's life. This incarnation is that someone could crosspost something that I did not intend to be crossposted. But all of this could have happened before.

Finally, I'd like to raise one more point that I think is relevant. I've seen a couple of "this makes it so much easier" responses, and that true, but we've already seen LJ learn and react by re-adjusting the tab order to exclude the ticky boxes. They're not making a unilateral change and leaving people stuck with it: they're listening and adapting the service to what people want. I think the reaction and feedback to LJ are important, but I think they're listening and that they will adjust the parameters as necessary. It's clear that many users WANTED the crossposting so they added it. It also seems clear that there are privacy concerns for some people. My guess is that they'll address them.

[jazzfish]

No, not directed at you at all! This was a reaction against posts and comments by other people. I've definitely appreciated our discussion.

In comments at DW, coraa provides an excellent example of the "distinction between 'public' and 'publicized.'" I can see where this is a place where it's possible for reasonable people to disagree, provided those people agree that, while it's maybe foolish to talk about your coworkers in a busy street, it's flat-out /wrong/ (or, charitably, horribly mistaken) for someone to broadcast it.

I really really hope they're listening and making changes based on user feedback (the tab order fix is a small positive sign). I've seen mention of this possibly being a result of a contract between FB/Twitter and LJ; that would explain why a) there's absolutely no 'disable for my journal' option, and b) even if you don't have it enabled you can't get rid of the %&$ check boxes without resorting to CSS hackery. I'm trying to reserve judgement for another week.