When does a privacy enhancement become a privacy distribution mechanism? OPS was a distributed content tagging system with the idea that various organizations would rate web content, and browsers would subscribe to the user’s desired system. I wrote this article about it in 1997, but it’s become relevant again as we discuss how to do distributed content-moderation on federated systems like Mastodon. Bluesky has proposed a similar system as well. What’s interesting is that the threat and privacy models have changed considerably since then.

Funerals are frequently a rallying point for the ideals of the deceased. When else do you have the attention of the country focused and thinking about a single set of values and issues? Nobody is claiming that President Carter said anything that would have gone contrary to the wishes of Correta King. On the contrary, she probably would have been very pleased at the attention those words have received.

This whole persona/pseudonym argument may seem like a tempest in a teapot, but the fact is, the forum for public discourse is no longer the town hall, or newspaper, or fliers on the street. It is here on the Internet, and it is happening in communities like this, hosted by private sector companies. Freedom of speech is not guaranteed in these places. As Lawrence Lessig once said, “the code is the law.” The code that Google applies, the rules they set up now in the software, are going to influence our right to speak out now and in the future. It is imperative that we impress upon Google the importance of providing users with the same rights (and responsibilities) as exist in the society that nurtured Google and brought about its success.

I think people who say "I'm more comfortable talking to people who use their real names" or "they should find another social network" don't realize just what a broad swath of the population is being eliminated by this policy. ... For some excellent personal statements on the importance of name privacy, see http://my.nameis.me/ If you're wondering where I came up with "ten or more percent of the population", that's what I believe is a conservative estimate, based on the number of people on Facebook who don't use their real names.

At the end of 2016 Wired declared it to be the year that we won the battle for encryption. Unfortunately, as we increasingly move towards an authoritarian State, it becomes obvious that was a very short-lived victory.