I’m generally not a fan of increasing the amount of illegible selection effects.
On the privacy side, can lesswrong guarantee that, if I never click on Recommended, then recombee will never see an (even anonymized) trace of what I browse on lesswrong?
Typo? Do you mean “click on Recommended”? I think the answer is no, in order to have recommendations for individuals (and everyone), they have browsing data.
1) LessWrong itself doesn’t aim for a super high degree of infosec. I don’t believe our data is sensitive to warrant large security overhead. 2) I trust Recombee with our data about as much as our trust ourselves to not have a security breach. Maybe actually I could imagine LessWrong being of more interest to someone or some group and getting attacked.
It might help to understand what your specific privacy concerns are.
I would feel better about this if there was something closer to (1) on which to discuss what is probably the most important topic in history (AI alignment). But noted.
Over the years the idea of a closed forum for more sensitive discussion has been raised, but never seemed to quite make sense. Significant issues included: - It seems really hard or impossible to make it secure from nation state attacks - It seems that members would likely leak stuff (even if it’s via their own devices not being adequately secure or what)
I’m thinking you can get some degree of inconvenience (and therefore delay), but hard to have large shared infrastructure that’s that secure from attack.
I’m generally not a fan of increasing the amount of illegible selection effects.
On the privacy side, can lesswrong guarantee that, if I never click on Recommended, then recombee will never see an (even anonymized) trace of what I browse on lesswrong?
Typo? Do you mean “click on Recommended”? I think the answer is no, in order to have recommendations for individuals (and everyone), they have browsing data.
1) LessWrong itself doesn’t aim for a super high degree of infosec. I don’t believe our data is sensitive to warrant large security overhead.
2) I trust Recombee with our data about as much as our trust ourselves to not have a security breach. Maybe actually I could imagine LessWrong being of more interest to someone or some group and getting attacked.
It might help to understand what your specific privacy concerns are.
I would feel better about this if there was something closer to (1) on which to discuss what is probably the most important topic in history (AI alignment). But noted.
Over the years the idea of a closed forum for more sensitive discussion has been raised, but never seemed to quite make sense. Significant issues included:
- It seems really hard or impossible to make it secure from nation state attacks
- It seems that members would likely leak stuff (even if it’s via their own devices not being adequately secure or what)
I’m thinking you can get some degree of inconvenience (and therefore delay), but hard to have large shared infrastructure that’s that secure from attack.
I am sad to see you getting so downvoted. I am glad you are bringing this perspective up in the comments.