More on Walled Gardens
The discussions from Solderpunk and Jandal around walled gardens and
what makes them good or evil are interesting. Read them and come
back here for my thoughts.
gopher://sdf.org/0/users/solderpunk/phlog/two-walls-good-four-walls-bad.txt
gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jandal/phlog/communication-expectation-violations
Solderpunk is not crazy - walled gardens are not inherently bad. We
use the term in a pejorative way, but that is sloppy thinking, since
SDF has many of the same aspects of the same walled gardens we love
to hate.
Jandal clarified that user expectations with any walled gardens are
key, and services that violate these expectations are evil. Whatever
is written in these services' "privacy" policies, my expectations
might be quite different, and this is by design. They might use
tricky legal terms or have confusing sharing settings, or they might
surreptitiously allow government agencies to tap the fiber
connections between their datacenters. All evil from my perspective.
But I think there is another important aspect of walled gardens that
separates good from evil - and that is what degree of anonymity they
allow. In that regard, I put a service like SDF at the top of the
good pile. I can sign up for an SDF account with any name at all,
and a throwaway email address, and if I later want to donate to
become an ARPA member, say, I can send a donation in cash with no
return address, or I can send bitcoins. No name, no cell phone
number, no address, no birthday required. Further, SDF doesn't
collect any information on its users [0], so it will be difficult
for a third-party (either unauthorized or authorized) to breach that
level of anonymity. Not impossible, but very hard.
[0]
http://sdf.org/?tutorials/privacy_policy
