@ireneista @smallcircles want to highlight in your response here how you identified a specifically moral right, which is a helpful and important progression from the terminology of unprefixed rights invoked in OP. without a framework to reconcile fundamental rights, two people may claim to have mutually contradictory "rights", which is the classic paradox that results from a framework of purely negative liberties (freedom from vs freedom to). rights frameworks (and legal systems more generally) seek to reconcile facial contradictions with a series of structured compromises between parties. if a government were legislating the fediverse, these would be decided as a matter of law
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@ireneista @smallcircles i'm replying not to educate irenes (who taught me much of the above in the first place) but to identify to onlookers that your invocation of the moral right here is more subtle and powerful than it may appear at first because it speaks to that very tension inherent in a system of rights we would like to create together. it's a very radical thing to propose a system of government, even more so one with guarantees of protection as described so concisely here
@ireneista @smallcircles i also think cryptographic systems should be discussed in these terms because while the game theoretical constructions in terms of oracles work for academic purposes, the intentionally abstract thought experiments they invoke also serve to depoliticize engineering decisions
@ireneista @smallcircles one curious analogy to OP is the variance across US states around the legality of recording a phone call. making it illegal to record a phone call you participated in typically renders the recording inadmissible as evidence (so you can't use a recording in court). this makes certain forms of whistleblowing illegal and makes it much more difficult to litigate an employer for sexual harassment. therefore, this "two-party" law (as observed in the state of california) structurally disadvantages plaintiffs.
@ireneista @smallcircles however, in advocacy (and even in the name "two-party"), the matter of recording is not cast in terms of litigation between adversarial parties, but as if it were a more intimate discussion between two good-faith individuals who are not currently filing a lawsuit against each other. one might even go so far as to think the two-party consent law would protect you against self-incrimination by law enforcement, assuming that nobody can record you without your consent under any circumstances. this is unfortunately not how (nor why) such laws are written, because US state governments will only protect the rights of their own citizens at best, and only under duress.
@ireneista @smallcircles this is also obv not intended to "educate" irenes, but to speak to another case where the legality of recording is actively used to harm (in my case, it arose while i was experiencing illegal discrimination from an employer, which i resolved by switching employers instead of litigating). i see this as complimentary to and distinct from irenes's analysis—irenes proposes the rights-based framework that protects the act of recording (this is a necessary prerequisite to any discussion), while mine instead identifies a structural disadvantage that results from the illegalization of making your own recording (which imperils the free exercise of fundamental rights).
@ireneista i like @smallcircles a lot and think this is exactly the convo we should be having! but i did want to note how OP begins with:
in daily life, if [...], you have the right to [...]
i expounded at length upon the above interpretation predicated upon adversarial litigation, because i think "daily life" can often be a(n unintentionally) misleading/deceptive framing for the thought experiments we use to understand the future we want to build for each other. i think we absolutely want to construct systems that make sense to our users.
but human rights are not yet universally agreed upon (!), and for people who don't have the experience of recordings being used against them e.g. by law enforcement, "daily life" probably doesn't include the scenarios (like irenes initially proposed in their extremely effective and concise reply) in which fundamental rights would bear upon the answer to this legal policy question. so that's where i might question the framing of "daily life" when used to adjudicate questions around technical capabilities as per OP.
@ireneista @smallcircles i do think it's important to consider "daily life" in the context i suspect it was being invoked in for OP, namely to consider the threat model of the user we're building for (and even to acknowledge that there may be multiple such threat models, which may not overlap neatly at first).
signal is effective because it identifies a specific threat model and guarantees user safety within those parameters—for fedi software with an idea of normal usage (e.g. assuming a single human user per account), one immediate consideration arises: who should have access to the recording of a conversation, and how can it be stored? one particular guarantee signal provides is repudiation—in general, a signal message alone provides no cryptographic assurance of the sender's identity. a screenshot of a fedi thread can record a conversation, but it too has no guarantee of correctness (you can edit or fake a screenshot).
in general, screenshots are pretty effective for some types of behavior, but the reporting function on fedi does not rely upon screenshots alone (i'm not sure how reporting works in general but i know this is an area of active study). so in the vein of irenes distinguishing moral right vs convention, it would also be useful to identify ways that recordings are already made, and what role the Delete activity currently plays in reconstructions of the past, so we can then imagine the impact of the policy decision under discussion (i say "imagine" because it's important to accept that there may be unintended consequences)
Great follow-up. Thank you.
