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Comment by Thorrez | Hacker News Reader

>supporting restrictions on speech and privacy violations

That's a confusing phrase. It took me a while to realize you meant "supporting privacy violations" rather than "supporting restrictions on privacy violations". You seem to be lumping speech restrictions and privacy violations into the same bucket, but I see them as very different, often even opposed to each other. The US elevates free speech higher than privacy. Europe elevates privacy higher than free speech. In many European countries the press isn't allowed to report the names or faces of suspects. In many European countries you can't take pictures of people walking on the street.

Doxing is a clear case where free speech is directly opposed to privacy. Same with right to be forgotten.

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> You seem to be lumping speech restrictions and privacy violations into the same bucket, but I see them as very different, often even opposed to each other.

And yet today there was an article in the front page claiming that Signal is a problem because its end to end encryption can be used by anyone, even "bad actors", to communicate. That's an attack on both privacy and free speech, and I wouldn't be shocked if GP had that article (and others like it) in mind.

Mind you, most of the comments here rightfully called that article out for the absurd fear-mongering it was, and even the increasingly common censorship apologists were unusually silent. I was pleasantly surprised, even if it did still get a lot of upvotes and reached the front page.

Fixed the wording to make it a bit more clear, thanks. Connecting doxing as a privacy violation to free speech is a very interesting point that I didn't think about - I was thinking about data collection and tracking when talking about privacy violations.

For what you bring up with doxing, I don't think I have a very satisfying answer. I definitely won't advocate for keeping it on social media websites. But I can't advocate for all-powerful tools that would allow even for actually dangerous content like that to be tracked down and removed from everywhere, because there is no way to ensure that tools like that will not be abused.

Remove it from Twitter, block it on your own federation nodes, try to bring the perpetrators to justice, but, as painful as it is, you shouldn't have a magic button that would be able to completely eradicate that from the internet.

It would also be good to reduce data collection and to teach people to be more conscious of what they share to prevent private information from leaking to begin with.

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