Thread · 5 tweets · 24 Jul 2020

Thanks a lot Luis! I don't disagree that control is valuable, but I think it is being overemphasised (or from the wrong angle) in most of today's discussion of privacy, at least in industry. To steal from @hartzog I believe it needs to be "rejuvenated".

The way most of digital privacy works today is that you do the thing people don't want by default and then you provide a cryptic setting to change it — then you can tell them they have privacy because they have control, and if they feel victimised they should blame themselves.

This doesn't seem people shouldn't have control, but in the same way that confidentiality/transparency/security become (again, from @hartzog) discretion/honesty/protection I wonder if there isn't a case to be made to switch from control to autonomy. Back to Belmont! :)

Sometimes autonomy is control, but a lot of the time it is not requiring you to control anything because technology did the right thing for you, on its own, so you have time and mental resources to dedicate to flourishing — which was the point of having tech in the first place.

Anyway — I could ramble for a while! Whenever someone suggests control as the solution, my team tends to ask: "how do we do this so they don't even need that?" It's useful, but I see it more as a fallback.