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