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Comment by inopinatus | Hacker News Reader

> 2. They've never been the focus of a harassment campaign because they're not stupid enough to put their personal details out there on the internet and then be surprised that people will use that to harass them. They also don't feed the trolls in the first place.

This is a) simple victim blaming and b) impossible to fix in some situations. Illustration of (b) is that the companies of which I'm a director are a matter of public record, and for very little money indeed you can buy online a copy of that record including my home address and telephone number.

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Can't you use a POB and special business number?

It's not "victim blaming". It's just what's so. With the Internet, every obnoxious jerk on the planet can come after you, if you attract enough attention.

No, here in Australia, director's information must be place of residence; although there is a process for suppression or replacement based on personal safety needs, for most that'd be closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. What's more, the information is still in the database, it's just masked in standard extracts; the data is one weak password away from exfiltration.

I believe it is most certainly victim blaming. The existence of terrible people may well induce one to recommend countermeasures, but the phrasing "stupid enough to put their personal details out there" is first-class (and thoroughly obnoxious) assignment of responsibility for bad behaviour to the victim of that behaviour. It's the same logical construction as blaming rape victims for their clothing.

As for "attract enough attention", the bar for that has been lowered in recent times to "one tweet".

These are not happy times to be a private citizen communicating online in anything but the most closed fora.

OK, but as director of whatever, perhaps one shouldn't be tweeting controversially. And if one is tweeting controversially, perhaps as part of one's job, then one ought to practice good OpSec.

This isn't a new issue: http://www.learnliberty.org/blog/anonymity-and-doxing-in-the...

Yeah I don't really understand why people want to be anonymous on the internet - and if you don't want people to have your personal information against you, then you do want to be anonymous - but hate the idea that anyone else is anonymous.

Huh? You don't understand why people want anonymity? Or at least, pseudonymity?

No, I don't understand why people want anonymity while also demanding that people can't anonymously send them messages on a public platform the entire point of which is the sending of messages.

People want to be anonymous, but don't want just anyone to be able to send them messages. Okay, so who can send you messages? Who can post things you can see? What is your solution to this?

I guess I misinterpreted your comment as well.

No he is pointing out irony. He is saying that a lot of people feel like they should be anonymous, but that others, fit whatever reason shouldn't be allowed to. Celebrities, pundits etc.

It's akin to celebs complaining about gun control, stating they hate guns and would never have one themselves, as they are guarded by several armed body guards.

You've conflated "controversial" with "attracting harassment", which I perceive as pretty much in line with your earlier defence of victim blaming. This is something I reject outright as simply another angle chilling the speech of the victims of online harassment, instead of attenuating the bullies.

I'm responsible for my own OpSec, but we both know that public registries have their own vulnerabilities. Again, I think I detect a misattribution of responsibility. Nevertheless that was a single example, not the entirety of the means by which personal information can be gleaned by the unscrupulous.

My counter-position is that it is essential for we who have influence over systems design and policy to avoid unintended negative social consequences in the services we build.

If you want walled gardens, by all means build walled gardens. But don't imagine that you can prevent people from using other services. And talking about you.

It is victim-blaming and it's shitty to say that people shouldn't use services like twitter to protect themselves from harassment while omitting that people shouldn't be assholes online in the first place.

Yes, of course, "people shouldn't be assholes online".

But there are at least two problems. One is subjectivity. As in "terrorist" vs "freedom fighter". The other is that there are lots of assholes out there. Billions of them. It's like spam. You just gotta filter it out.

That's stupid and you know it. No matter how much you might want it to be otherwise, people exist. People disagree with you. To varying degrees, they might be hostile about it. Some would characterise my comments in this thread as hostile and worthy of being censored. I think that's ludicrous, and yet there we are.

I think everyone can agree that the most egregious examples of harassment are bad. Sending someone a new picture of gore from a newly created Twitter account every hour for years (or whatever example is trotted out every time this comes up) or scouring DNS records for their address and swatting someone? Yeah obviously that's bad, we all know that's bad. Those are harassment to the level of being criminal offences anyway, there are ways to deal with them.

And I think that everyone agrees that telling someone that their ideas are 'stupid and naive' is perhaps a little hostile, but not to the extent that it needs to be censored.

So what's the middle ground? Are we allowed to swear? Are we going to apply the Americans' ideas of what is offensive to the internet? Because I sure as fuck don't come from America and I sure as fuck don't appreciate being told what is and is not acceptable from a country where it's illegal to say the word 'shit' on TV but it's legal for the Westboro Baptist Church to harass people mourning at the military funerals of gay soldiers. You can sort your own shit out before you start policing the language and behaviour of people in other countries talking to other people from other countries over the international medium that is the internet.

If you want to filter offensive language from your twitter replies, go ahead. Twitter and Facebook are already incredibly filtered thought bubbles, that ship has sailed. It's not going to get any worse if you can automatically filter out everything with language you find 'offensive'.

But this 'let's build a future internet without assholes' stuff is pathetic. What I consider an arsehole, you might consider someone just defending their pronouns or whatever it was that kid stabbed his teacher for the other day.

You've gone into flamewar and incivility in this thread. That's an abuse of HN and not allowed here. Other people broke the site guidelines too, but that's no reason to respond in kind and certainly not to keep perpetuating a tedious spat. We ban accounts that do these things, so please fix this. Specifically, please eliminate name-calling and incivility from your comments and if you can't post thoughtfully, don't post until you can.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

If you get harassed by an asshole at the bar every time you go, you pick a new bar.

It takes 5 seconds to make a new account and send the info to the few people you want to bring along.

By the time the troll figures out who you are again, they've usually stopped caring.

Repeat as required.

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