Developers of Sympa

[Flemming Bjerke <address@concealed>]

As member of the board of the Danish IT-Political Organisation I am very
apt to think in privacy. In particular, I find facebook a privacy
intruding catastrophy because millions of people have disclosed intimate
data to the world - or at least friends and Facebook - and very likely
NSA as well. The case of Amanda Todd  illustrate well how concerning
this global stripping of privacy is, and how easy private persons,
companies, organisations and governments may misuse such information.

I think next generation of Sympa should incorporate privacy protection
by design. What is wrong with facebook, is that it promote supplying
intimate data and thus privacy invasion. Next generation of Sympa should
do the opposite. Any new mailinglist or forum should have the following
basic features:

Persons are identified by a pseudonym and their email is not disclosed.
Their profile should give no information about themselves except that
they are an opportunity to say something about their reason for being on
the list, i.e. filling one text-field - and they should be told not to
disclose private information.

It should be an opt-in on administrator or list-owner level to depart
from this, e.g. asking list users to reveal to real name, photo, etc. Of
course, there are contexts in which it makes sense to ask the
listmembers to disclose some information about themselves. But, the
point is to make admins, owners and users aware of what is reasonable
and sufficient to disclose.

Will it work? My own experience on facebook says: yes. All the
information about myself (unfortunately except my name) are lies, and I
write it explicitly on my profile. Despite having the account for year,
and often writing controversial comments, I have had two or three
complaints about that my account is fake. But, after explaining why, the
accusations disappeared. That is all.

But, in spite of anonymity - or rather because of anonymity -  we have
to enhance trust and respect for each other on mailinglists/forums.
Anyhow, one must be able to establish oneself as a respectable and
reliable individual. Therefore, trust and respect enhancing features are
very important.

That is, it should be possible to build up reputation, and it should be
possible block certain persons as well as receiving mails from them.

In order to promote quality, it should also be possible to give points
to comments/mails in the webinterface (a possibility that might be
restricted to certain persons, cf. slashdot), and it should be possible
to block seeing comments with too few points, and have such low value
comments excluded in digests.

The point is to combine privacy/anonymity with reputation and quality
enhancing features. This is of course just a rough idea that is not
developed sufficiently for practical purposes (though slashdot
developed the most important features many years ago). But, I think it
is important that the open source community develop mailinglist/forum
systems that address the concerns of privacy invasion and surveillance.

Best

Flemming