I generally feel reasonably comfortable sharing unsolicited emails, unless the email makes some kind of implicit request to not be published, that I judge at least vaguely valid. In general I am against “default confidentiality” norms, especially for requests or things that might be kind of adversarial. I feel like I’ve seen those kinds of norms weaponized in the past in ways that seems pretty bad, and think that while there is a generally broad default expectation of unsolicited private communication being kept confidential, it’s not a particularly sacred protection in my mind (unless explicitly or implicitly requested, in which case I think I would talk to the person first to get a more fully comprehensive understanding for why they requested confidentiality, and would generally err on the side of not publishing, though would feel comfortable overcoming that barrier given sufficient adversarial action)
unless the email makes some kind of implicit request to not be published
What does “implicit request” mean here? There are a lot of email conversations where no one writes a single word that’s alluding to ‘don’t share this’, but where it’s clearly discussing very sensitive stuff and (for that reason) no one expects it to be posted to Hacker News or whatever later.
Without having seen the emails, I’m guessing Leverage would have viewed their conversation with Alyssa as ‘obviously a thing we don’t want shared and don’t expect you to share’, and I’m guessing they’d confirm that now if asked?
I do think that our community is often too cautious about sharing stuff. But I’m a bit worried about the specific case of ‘normalizing big infodumps of private emails where no one technically said they didn’t want the emails shared’.
(Maybe if you said more about why it’s important in this specific case? The way you phrased it sort of made it sound like you think this should be the norm even for sensitive conversations where no one did anything terrible, but I assume that’s not your view.)
I don’t know, kind of complicated, enough that I could probably write a sequence on it, and not even sure I would have full introspective access into what I would feel comfortable labeling as an “implicit request”.
I could write some more detail, but it’s definitely a matter of degree, and the weaker the level of implicit request, the weaker the reason for sharing needs to be, with some caveats about adjusting for people’s communication skills, adversarial nature of the communication, adjusting for biases, etc.
I want to throw out that while I am usually SUPER on team “explicit communication norms”, the rule-nuances of the hardest cases might sometimes work best if they are a little chaotic & idiosyncratic.
I personally think there might be something mildly-beneficial and protective, about having “adversarial case detected” escape-clauses that vary considerably from person-to-person.
(Otherwise, a smart lawful adversary can reliably manipulate the shit out of things.)
I have them, but I’m generally hesitant to share emails as they normally aren’t considered public. I’d appreciate any arguments on this, pro or con
I generally feel reasonably comfortable sharing unsolicited emails, unless the email makes some kind of implicit request to not be published, that I judge at least vaguely valid. In general I am against “default confidentiality” norms, especially for requests or things that might be kind of adversarial. I feel like I’ve seen those kinds of norms weaponized in the past in ways that seems pretty bad, and think that while there is a generally broad default expectation of unsolicited private communication being kept confidential, it’s not a particularly sacred protection in my mind (unless explicitly or implicitly requested, in which case I think I would talk to the person first to get a more fully comprehensive understanding for why they requested confidentiality, and would generally err on the side of not publishing, though would feel comfortable overcoming that barrier given sufficient adversarial action)
What does “implicit request” mean here? There are a lot of email conversations where no one writes a single word that’s alluding to ‘don’t share this’, but where it’s clearly discussing very sensitive stuff and (for that reason) no one expects it to be posted to Hacker News or whatever later.
Without having seen the emails, I’m guessing Leverage would have viewed their conversation with Alyssa as ‘obviously a thing we don’t want shared and don’t expect you to share’, and I’m guessing they’d confirm that now if asked?
I do think that our community is often too cautious about sharing stuff. But I’m a bit worried about the specific case of ‘normalizing big infodumps of private emails where no one technically said they didn’t want the emails shared’.
(Maybe if you said more about why it’s important in this specific case? The way you phrased it sort of made it sound like you think this should be the norm even for sensitive conversations where no one did anything terrible, but I assume that’s not your view.)
I don’t know, kind of complicated, enough that I could probably write a sequence on it, and not even sure I would have full introspective access into what I would feel comfortable labeling as an “implicit request”.
I could write some more detail, but it’s definitely a matter of degree, and the weaker the level of implicit request, the weaker the reason for sharing needs to be, with some caveats about adjusting for people’s communication skills, adversarial nature of the communication, adjusting for biases, etc.
I want to throw out that while I am usually SUPER on team “explicit communication norms”, the rule-nuances of the hardest cases might sometimes work best if they are a little chaotic & idiosyncratic.
I personally think there might be something mildly-beneficial and protective, about having “adversarial case detected” escape-clauses that vary considerably from person-to-person.
(Otherwise, a smart lawful adversary can reliably manipulate the shit out of things.)
I would just ask the other party whether they are OK to share rather than speculating about what the implicit expectation is.