I did have a pretty strong expectation of privacy for LW DMs. That was probably dumb of me.
This is not due to any explicit or implicit promise by the mods or the site interface I can recall. I think I was just automatically assuming that strong DM privacy would be a holy principle on a forum with respectable old-school internet culture around anonymity and privacy. This wasn’t really an explicitly considered belief. It just never occurred to me to question this. Just like I assume that doxxing is probably an offence that can result in an instant ban, even though I never actually checked the site guidelines on that.
The site is not responsible for my carelessness on this, but if there was an attention-grabbing box in the DM interface making it clear that mods do look at DMs and DM metadata under some circumstances that fall short of a serious criminal investigation or an apocalypse, I would have appreciated that.
FWIW, de-facto I have never looked at DMs or DM metadata, unless multiple people reached out to us about a person spamming or harassing them, and then we still only looked at the DMs that that person sent.
So I think your prior here wasn’t crazy. It is indeed the case that we’ve never acted against it, as far as I know.
I did have a pretty strong expectation of privacy for LW DMs. That was probably dumb of me.
This is not due to any explicit or implicit promise by the mods or the site interface I can recall. I think I was just automatically assuming that strong DM privacy would be a holy principle on a forum with respectable old-school internet culture around anonymity and privacy. This wasn’t really an explicitly considered belief. It just never occurred to me to question this. Just like I assume that doxxing is probably an offence that can result in an instant ban, even though I never actually checked the site guidelines on that.
The site is not responsible for my carelessness on this, but if there was an attention-grabbing box in the DM interface making it clear that mods do look at DMs and DM metadata under some circumstances that fall short of a serious criminal investigation or an apocalypse, I would have appreciated that.
FWIW, de-facto I have never looked at DMs or DM metadata, unless multiple people reached out to us about a person spamming or harassing them, and then we still only looked at the DMs that that person sent.
So I think your prior here wasn’t crazy. It is indeed the case that we’ve never acted against it, as far as I know.