What's our marketing hook? What do we do about it?

Safe is similar: only published data is accessible forever. Private shared data is only accessible to those you grant access.

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Ok, I’ll have to learn more about it than, thanks

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I agree. This point alone is a dealbreaker for me and I have a problem putting my support behind a network that can not delete mistakes. Think of the potential consequences for young teenagers/children posting on the network. I think this potentially can be a big problem for Safe adoption and will get a lot of negative press. First, do no harm. Than freedom!

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It’s a different base, but that’s then built upon.

Consider the base we have right now, and if you were suddenly confronted with that without having grown into it, would that not also be a deal breaker? I think it would for many here, and I suggest that’s what we’re saying by being here.

So how might we build differently here, where we define the rules, own and control who sees what?

Maybe we don’t publish everything in a way that someone else decides (eg Facebook). Maybe instead we choose who can see it, maybe we choose apps which allow us time to see what we’ve written and think before it’s visible to others.

I’m not suggesting those answer these concerns. The important thing is that we get to choose. It will take time to develop both the applications and they way we interact in what will be a different space, one which puts us in control rather than directs and controls the environment, and us as part of it.

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I don’t like the catchphrase ‘the new Internet’ because it implies replacing the old, and while it’s a great rallying cry that scares people. A new Internet where I can’t erase my mistakes? No thanks.

Anyway, the current Internet (or more accurately Web) isn’t going anywhere. What we’re really talking about is offering a choice of Internets, an alternative opt-in Web where everything is permanent, with all the implications that implies.

It’s important to fight on the right territory.

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Currently, private and private group data can be deleted too. It is only data that is published as public data that cannot be deleted - once it is in the public domain, you no longer own it.

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This deserves a topic on it’s own and an in depth one. Can you ever erase a thing done publicly? We cannot shout and suck the words back in, but we can digitally shout and then quickly erase, edit or otherwise and think we have sucked the words back in.

It’s an interesting one, perhaps more like the USA in business we should celebrate mistakes, I make so many and regret none as that is who I am, it’s who everyone is, the sum of all their actions, good and bad. I wonder if feeling we make no mistakes by imagining nobody seen the post or whatever really is helpful? I wonder also if thinking that the quick delete was not captured in the many log files, archiving sites etc. is at all healthy?

Maybe it’s much less stressful and significantly more honest to be able to say, hey if you want to see my mistakes they are all there in the history of anything I post publicly?

Anyway I do find it interesting, but at the same time I am glad I am not a 16 year old coming into a world of cameras and so on where the choice of publishing is removed and no longer only a personal choice. Different story though. Here we are talking of choosing to publish and making a mistake or later changing your mind, I feel we should encourage folk to know it’s Ok to change you mind, that is what makes us so strong as a species.

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Yes, it’s very hard to understand this total surveillance world. Cameras and microphones everywhere. Is it realistic to think we can delete anything? Especially on the internet.

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No, but the difference is that what we say in person is not usually what we want all the world to hear. Human communication has many fine gradations. We say different things in different contexts to different audiences. It’s not 1 or 0. Having a chat with a friend and broadcasting that chat live on TV are very different things, even if the words are the same.

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Probably better to know you can’t than to think you can.

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Secure messaging

Publically posting info.

These are the 2 modes Safe offers Safely. We don’t consider it binary at all. You either engage in private data sharing/comm or public, but if it’s public it’s there for good. That’s the difference I think.

[Edit I should say it’s all there forever, even private, but private is private to those you shared/spoke with unless they share it further I think we are on the same page @JPL ]

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That’s why I am here. I am on board with the plan and goals.

A goal to address this true application is very important and a plan needs to be communicated to the public before Beta. Are we sure that Safe Network will get us more privacy and freedom? If I can’t delete my mistake is that more freedom? If my young teenager uploads some compromising photos, it will stay public forever. Is this more privacy? All of these are important questions. Is the ability to delete public uploads a political or technical decision?

No politics, but it’s a network fundimental and has been since day 1. The ability to not remove data is implicit in the store forever and hard to hack (currently a hash collisions is infeasible or what is referred to as “crypto hard” to do).

The point is today

Is in fact the case.

That teenager maybe never even uploaded it publically themselves, but even then it’s copied and shared by many on many platforms etc.

I honestly believe the “feeling” of safety of deleting a post/picture is a false one and currently not possible.

Then the balance of your blog/website, imagine it never gets taken down, never vanishes, stays forever, that scientific paper that may be useful in many years is still there. Those apps we need to read the paper are still there etc.

So the price of not deleting data may be our mistakes last forever, but then so does our totality of human knowledge (I hope) and that may be a cost we happily pay?

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I share your concerns as a father.
But the answer is not to allow them or anyone for that matter to believe these actions are reversible.

The answer in my opinion is to educate from a very young age the pitfalls and potential consequences of behavior in general but especially online.

They will live in a world far more connected than the one we live in and raising them with the false belief that poor decisions can be erased with the delete button is a one way road to regret.

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Bit philosophical here as a point but I think it’s relevant and almost being said above if I’m not reading too much into things… There’s this feeling at the moment that the comment you made two weeks ago, three months ago, ten years ago, is in a real sense ‘you’ and you have to answer up to it and take full ‘responsibility’ for it now in the present. The same for the image of you from the past, the statement you made, even the statements you made privately when you thought no-one was snooping.

I would suggest that that is not you, and that people can change. We should be looking to discuss and change beliefs and judge and condemn bad ones, while being more understanding that we all say and believe ‘stupid’ things at some point.

To do otherwise leads to a stifling intellectual culture, and leads to people not taking risks, or being honest, or admitting their ignorance, and self-censoring. I can understand people’s fears on this one but think the Safe idea of permanent public data forces us to have this necessary discussion, points the way to a much more sane situation, while removing the imbalance in knowledge by making the database (the network in our case) available to all.

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Are we not who we are now because of who we were then?

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Yes absolutely - and we are who we are now because of who we weren’t then and who we aren’t now

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People change, but it is often useful to see where they have come from. How many folks lie, then try to pretend it never happened? How many people said incorrect/bad/evil things, then just tried to brush them under the carpet? How many of these people are those in positions of power, such as business leaders and politicians?

If people have genuinely changed, they should be able to explain why. They should be able to explain their previous and current positions and explain why their opinion has changed. Doesn’t that show maturity, an ability to accept that they are fallible, but still capable of self improvement?

So yes, there will be meek folks who aren’t brave enough to assert their opinions. They will either be absent from the debate or will contribute nothing of substance. There will also be people who will speak from the heart and show wisdom enough to change.

Lastly, we don’t have to expose our identity, if we choose not to, on Safe Network. We can use pseudonyms as throw away personalities or as (cryptographically proven) alter-egos that build a reputation and a character of their own. This is really hard to do on the clear net, where your identity can be exposed all too easily, even on request of services who refuse to allow pseudonyms.

If my kids were using Safe Network, I’d suggest they and their friends used pseudonyms. This would offer them a degree of protection. Obviously, I would also encourage them to think about what they publish; many things in life can’t be undone (giving birth, losing a limb, etc) and this should be considered one of them.

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This offers only weak protection as identification from social interactions would be relatively easy given access to other data sets. The network’s strength will be in making it hard to access the social interactions unless they are public. So I think that’s the important part.

We’ve been conditioned to accept interacting socially in a completely non private way, whether inside Facebook or in public on Twitter or a [cough] forum, so that needs to change along with resuming the human skill of learning what to share with whom.

I think things will be much better when we choose who is present in a closed group, and what is visible outside the group, and through that there will be much less need for pseudonyms. Those will be most useful in public spaces.

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I agree, but perhaps it is society that needs to adjust. I follow Scott Adams (the Dilbert guy) and he has some interesting things to say. One of his ideas is that we shouldn’t really care about what someone did more than 20 years ago. Aside from something really bad (murder, etc.) someone shouldn’t be judged on who they were, but on who they are. If they expressed ideas back then that are reprehensible now, but acknowledge that and say they’ve changed their opinion that’s it. No public shaming, online cancellation, etc. I rather like this idea. Society should be able to handle the bumps and warts of real discourse without having a meltdown.

The other idea SA has is what he calls the “48-hour rule”. If someone says something offensive and then clarifies what they meant within 48 hours they should be allowed the clarification without penalty. Mis-speaks, mis-interpretations, mis-representations happen all the time. If someone clarifies what they meant they should not be blamed for how someone interpreted what they initially said even if it was said poorly or even incorrectly.

Within this context (greater personal responsibility) I think there is a place for SAFE to move the culture in a more open, and truly forgiving, direction.

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