What follows is not legal (or investment, or other) advice. I just wanted to share how I think we should reason about XX Network and the so-called “right to privacy”.
Educate yourself and reach your own conclusions.
Right to own property ¶
We often hear activists (especially socialist) and even community members talk about the right to privacy.
Should you be able to walk naked on the street while demanding the government to spend taxpayer money to protect your privacy, so that no one can see your naked posterior? I don’t think so.
Besides, human rights are inalienable - something we are born with - and don’t depend on there being a taxpayer to fund them, or a government to protect them. Hence:
- One can’t say there’s a right to the Internet, because that would mean billions of people had their freedoms violated before the Internet existed. Or that - should the Internet cease to exist - we could suddenly sue the government for not letting us exercise that right. Clearly, that wold be ludicrous!
- One can’t say there’s a right to privacy if they place their correspondence in public domain. For example, imagine two neighbors shouting across the street - anyone within 200 steps can hear them. How could they claim a right to privacy? Should all passers-by detour that neighborhod to protect privacy of those neighbors?
What does it mean, then, when we talk about our right to protect personal communications through encryption or otherwise?
Private property implies exclusivity, inequality, and difference.
~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe
It means the right to not share our property with those who are not intended recipients of our message. Key concepts here are property and exclusivity.
That’s all there is to it: your message is your property and you have the right to exclude others from accessing it. It’s the same how it works with any other property.
The whole thing has nothing to do with democracy (no one can decide whether you should have the right to encryption - you have an inalienable right to your property) or the Internet or various invented “rights” that only serve to confuse and weaken the fundamental right.
Property is the foundation of every right we have, including the right to be free.
~ Cato Institute (source)
How does it work around the world? It’s different in every country, and in some the government or party or religious fascists can legally violate any human right they want. So, as they say, your mileage may vary.
In the United States, for example, there’s no “hard” constitutional right to privacy, but there are protections for it (the 14th amendment, for example). Search the Internet to find extensive commentary on that topic.
While we have little say about the extent to which one’s government respects human rights (property rights), we need to know what they are and why we have the right to protect them on XX Network.
Remember that the right to property predates the government or the ruling party or religious fundamentalists in every country, and it will also outlast all of them!
Ownership of sent messages ¶
Nodes on XX Network are privately-owned and a message we compose and encrypt is owned by us.
Once we send a message, no node can’t decrypt it en route. Eventually it reaches the intended recipient who can decrypt and read it. What then?
They read it and maybe delete it, or let it expire (like Signal an do). But they can also decide to write down the message, take a screenshot of it, and ultimately disclose it to others. Does that violate our rights? And if so, which one specifically?
This is a tricky question. Remember, we’re not talking about the right to protection against unreasonable search and seizure - something done by the government. It’s about disclosing personal & private messages to others, aka Publication of Private Facts.
In some parts of Canada, for example, you can’t even sue. In others you may, but whether your claim will be accepted is another matter (was “the invasion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person”, as the article says).
My personal perspective is based on property considerations.
If I send you an encrypted message, I make a copy of my message and give it to you. Is it reasonable to expect privacy? Perhaps it is, but consider:
- Are we on the same page, i.e. should we explicitly agree that contents of this message, or this entire chat, must not be shared with others?
- Due to the way XX Network works, I may not even know who you are and hence be unable to sue (even if you live next door, I may not know it’s you, and even if I did, I may be unable to prove it)
Even though eventually this may not be enforceable, I would say that messenger applications should have one-two check-boxes to confirm the participants are on the same page.
Let’s consider the case where you have been added to a chat and have not agreed to any rules. Now the other party may say “that doesn’t matter, I still have my expectations of privacy”.
From a property perspective, when you sent that message to the other party you made a copy. That copy is now owned by them - it’s their property - and we can no longer tell them what to do with it, unless we mutually agreed upon the rules before the message was sent.
That seems reasonable to me, because it lets all parties protect their interest without a priori limiting property rights. What do I mean about that?
Consider the situation in which you receive a message about which you’ve had prior knowledge, but the sender still sues you for disclosing it to others. If you get unlucky (for example, your identity is known to the sender, they can prove they sent you a message, but you can’t prove knowledge of that fact prior to receiving the message), you may lose in court. An ability to decline to receive such messages under clearly defined conditions protects participants from that risk.
If someone violates such an agreement we may be unable to prove it or identify them in order to sue, but there are ways to mitigate that. One could, for example, ask for a proof of identity to be submitted when “I agree” check-boxes are selected. If they’re in the same country you wouldn’t need an agreement (the same rules that apply to What’s App or email are likely to apply), of course.
That identity doesn’t have to be a government issued ID. It can be a proof of control over an Internet domain, for example. Maybe the person in control of DNS records is not the owner, but if it was important and you wanted to sue, you could likely identify the person who updated DNS records. I’ve no doubt there are even better ways to weakly prove one’s identity these days.
Conclusion ¶
Today our rights are governed by various legislative acts of this or that government,a dictator or a Party - all of which is totally insane when you think of it. How can a universal human right apply to a person right now, but not after a 5 minute walk across a country border? Clearly that’s not how it should to be, and we need to know that. (I have to say, I don’t like the term “universal human right” - as if there are any human rights that don’t exist in certain jurisdictions - remember there’s really just one: the right to property.)
It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the ‘right’ to education, the ‘right’ to health care, the ‘right’ to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville
We can easily reason about what our right in particular situations ought to be. They arise from our property rights, our ownership of messages and the ability to exclude everyone else from accessing them.
But when we send those messages, copies received by others belong to them, so when it comes to non-casual chats on XX Network, I’d want a feature that makes it possible to apply a mutually agreed upon contract that limits the use of such information.
That’s why I believe XX Messenger, and in the future, other XX Network applications, should add a feature which allow the participants to set privacy expectations even if that contract may be hard to enforce.