I like the mixed strategy. You don’t need to be perfectly consistent, only frequent enough that it carries very little weight. You need to obfuscate some multiple of actual cases of suppressing data, but some fraction of questions that are asked.
Most of the value in this kind of thing is _not_ information-hiding. The fact that the question is asked in the first place indicates a pretty high credence already of the asker. The point is deniability—the questioner doesn’t have usable proof of the activity, so can’t act on it. Deniability doesn’t take perfection by any means, only a bit of uncertainty.
With close friends or rationalist groups, you might agree in advance that there’s a “or I don’t want to tell you about what I did” attached to every statement about your life, or have a short abbreviation equivalent to that.
This doesn’t come up with close friends. This is only for groups and more distant power relationships where deniability matters.
In my culture, we don’t put much weight on true-but-information-limiting statements. We do spend a fair bit of effort on pedantry and unnecessary precision, though, so it’s fun to talk about this regarding “safe” topics. But that’s mostly a game and a chance to quote Futurama ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hou0lU8WMgo). Topics we actually care to keep hidden, we simply and directly lie, in whatever way moves the attention somewhere else.
This certainly can come up in close friendships. There was an incident last summer where a then-close-friend of mine told me an outright lie about what they were doing on a particular evening, in a one-on-one conversation, and I caught them, and that lie certainly contributed to the breakdown of the friendship and my current distrust of the person. If we had had a convention like this explicitly established, who knows where we would be instead. Probably would have ended up in the same place for other reasons, but it is hard to know.
On the other hand, I don’t think I would value a friendship as much if it had this convention attached to it.
Certainly, trust is an important element in friendships. I meant to say only that the compulsory answer and allowed information-hiding response that is the Glomer response, does not apply to friendships. For close friendships, you have a lot more options. Often, just don’t answer—talk about something else. Or just be truthful, and spend the effort to add the context which makes the answer OK. Or directly lie (if you can do it well enough).
“I am filling my technical responsibility by telling you that I will neither confirm nor deny this” just has no place in non-formal relationships like friends. This doesn’t change if you randomize or otherwise try to make it common.
I like the mixed strategy. You don’t need to be perfectly consistent, only frequent enough that it carries very little weight. You need to obfuscate some multiple of actual cases of suppressing data, but some fraction of questions that are asked.
Most of the value in this kind of thing is _not_ information-hiding. The fact that the question is asked in the first place indicates a pretty high credence already of the asker. The point is deniability—the questioner doesn’t have usable proof of the activity, so can’t act on it. Deniability doesn’t take perfection by any means, only a bit of uncertainty.
This doesn’t come up with close friends. This is only for groups and more distant power relationships where deniability matters.
In my culture, we don’t put much weight on true-but-information-limiting statements. We do spend a fair bit of effort on pedantry and unnecessary precision, though, so it’s fun to talk about this regarding “safe” topics. But that’s mostly a game and a chance to quote Futurama ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hou0lU8WMgo). Topics we actually care to keep hidden, we simply and directly lie, in whatever way moves the attention somewhere else.
This certainly can come up in close friendships. There was an incident last summer where a then-close-friend of mine told me an outright lie about what they were doing on a particular evening, in a one-on-one conversation, and I caught them, and that lie certainly contributed to the breakdown of the friendship and my current distrust of the person. If we had had a convention like this explicitly established, who knows where we would be instead. Probably would have ended up in the same place for other reasons, but it is hard to know.
On the other hand, I don’t think I would value a friendship as much if it had this convention attached to it.
Certainly, trust is an important element in friendships. I meant to say only that the compulsory answer and allowed information-hiding response that is the Glomer response, does not apply to friendships. For close friendships, you have a lot more options. Often, just don’t answer—talk about something else. Or just be truthful, and spend the effort to add the context which makes the answer OK. Or directly lie (if you can do it well enough).
“I am filling my technical responsibility by telling you that I will neither confirm nor deny this” just has no place in non-formal relationships like friends. This doesn’t change if you randomize or otherwise try to make it common.