Home

Thoughts On Privacy And Neopoligen

Starting to think about how websites will work when it comes to privacy. These are very early thoughts from a straight, white, dude. I'm putting them out there becuase I need help understanding other perspectives.

This is a "thinking-out-loud" post. I'm not sure about the ideas here. The purpose of this post is to write things down which helps me solidify my thinking. It's also to get feedback because I'm a staright, white, dude, who's been able to afford taking two years off to work on a personal project.

There are cavets for everything here that are worth discussing, but I'm not digging into them in this version of the post. For example, the idea I mention below that folks tend to behave better in public. That's not always true, but having to throw in that caveat on everything would break the overall vibe of this piece. Those discussions need to be had. Just at a different time.

  1. Make it 100% public
  2. Put 100% of it behind some auth service.

- One of the things I'm thinking about is that if you're site is fully public you'll act like everything you do on it is in public because it will be. I think we tend to be better behaved when we're in public.

- If a site is set up to only protect some content behind passwords and not others it makes it more complicated to think about and you have to constatly be making that decision. That's a friction which is something I don't like, but more importatly once something's been public you can't really take it back.

- Of coures, not being able to pull things back in that were put out "privately" is also not realistic. I'm not aware of any tech that can fully protect content once it goes out even if it's behind passwords or whatever. The reason is not the tech, it's other people. Anyone you give allow to access your stuff can copy it. There are ways to try to prevent that, but none of them are without their flaws. For example no matter what you do if someone can open a photo on a screen they can see they can use their phone to take a photo of the screen itself and get a pretty good copy.

- That leads me to the more general guideline of making your website 100% public.

- But, if you're running a business off it (i.e. your concernts about folks who get access to your content in an un-authorized manner are more financial than about personal safety) then adding authenticaiton systems into the mix makes a lot of sense.

- And yes, those statements, kinda contridicted themselves, but that's part of why I'm writing this. To find those contridictions. And, of course, a key point there is that the circumstances and different and that's why the guidelines are so different.

I've got some more thoughts on this, but I'm beat after a long day so that'll do to get started.

~ fin ~

Footnotes

authauth ⤴
TODO: Write up the difference between