In this article I am going to reflect on the dichotomy between privacy and exposure based mainly on my own experience between different social spheres, inside and outside the crypto world.
Expectations regarding the use of social platforms, communication applications and habits in general vary and contradict each other so much that different ones should be established people or identities for each of them. I will draw a parallel with the concept of “discourse genres” of linguistics to address what I believe is the best approach to this issue.
Social environments and their apps
Who hasn’t experienced meeting new people and encountering an incompatibility when exchanging contact information? “How do you not have WhatsApp!?”, “How do you not use X!?”, “I don’t have LinkedIn”, etc. For someone who lives by the norm, a normie we could say, The most natural thing is to use one or more of these popular platforms and those who do not use them practically do not exist in cyberspace.
When we enter the crypto, cypherpunk or more broadly hacker world, in their social circles, we find ourselves with the opposite questions: “How are you using Facebook?”; “WhatsApp? No, you have to talk to me on Telegram”; “Telegram is too insecure, I only communicate by XMPP”; “You can follow me on NOSTR”.
That takes you to a situation in which you either limit yourself to communicating with those who use the same platforms as you, or you segment your sociability on different platforms. We all do this to some extent, which has a parallel with what in linguistics are called discourse genres. These discourse genres are ways of classifying statements according to the context in which they are stated.
For example, the way we communicate in a job interview is different from the way we communicate in a class; or the way I am writing this article is different from the way I write in a group chat with my friends. Even the same words can have different connotations depending on the discourse genre in which they are framed.
Something similar happens with social platforms. Although users invent original ways to use them, the design of each one encourages a particular form of communication. For example, the character limit on X/Twitter prioritizes short, concise messages, while Facebook allows long posts and allows for long discussions, like a forum. Instagram prioritizes the image over the text, making prolonged debates uncomfortable and benefiting those who express themselves visually the most.
This has an effect on the type of people who use each platform or, rather, on how the same individual creates personas or masks (in Jungian sense) for each one. In internet slang we used to call this avataralthough today it is not used as much. That is to say, Accompanied by this specific discursive genre of a platform, comes a mask, a way of showing oneself in that space that is particular and different from the others.as humorously shown in the image above.
OPSEC Obses
The crypto world, as we know, has privacy as one of its central themes. This emphasis on privacy is its genesis and a legacy it carries from its cypherpunk ancestors. Let us consider that the bulk of the postulates of this techno-political current were made during the 1990s, in the web1when communications on the Internet were based mainly on email. The way of socializing online was very divorced from physical life, which is radically different today. With that in mind and without delving into the privacy practices of the original cypherpunks, let’s instead look at what it entails to live an anonymous online life today.
I am going to take as an example an advanced online anonymity tutorial, How to stay Anonymous with OPSECfrom a user named dzuma. Without going into too much detail, since this article is not a guide, but rather a reflection (although I recommend implementing some of these measures where possible), the video explains 6 anonymity techniques.
- Compartmentalization
- Metadata purging
- Un-google
- Get rid of the ego
- Create noise
- Physical OPSEC
The first, compartmentalization, the fourth, getting rid of the ego, and the sixth, physical OPSEC, are related to what I said before, but at an extreme level: running each application from a different device or virtual machine and not creating a recurring pseudonym, so that each activity we perform online is completely separated from the others.
The author of the video calls this “digital schizophrenia and paranoia,” a topic that relates to another article of mine. Bitcoin also practices Segmentation and the discardability of aliases as anonymity measures. For example, it is recommended do not reuse addressesreceive funds in cold wallets and sign transactions on devices disconnected from the network and without an operating system such as BitBox or SeedSigner.
Some hacker or hacktivist communities and some critical intellectuals of the surveillance capitalismsuch as the term’s own author, Soshanna Zuboff, They directly recommend not using services such as Meta, Amazon, Google or Microsoft. A particularly well-known text called Escape from the Matrix explains how to do this and was posted on the Hidden Wikithe guide and, for many, the gateway to TOR network.
The problem with this is that The high social dependence on these platforms means that not using them results in ostracism.. We are not just talking about being left out of everyday sociability for not communicating with friends and family or not being aware of the latest trends. Commerce, the world of work, also depend largely on these services and Not using them can mean being left without the possibility of employment or without being able to access certain goods and services. for not being able to communicate with the supplier.
The fatal error of Web3
With an optimistic and even naive perspective, the Ethereum solarpunks wanted bridge this contradiction between sociability and privacy by proposing the use of wallets as a form of self-sovereign identity.
While the whole point is that users’ identity is in their own hands and that they can access web services with their private key, it didn’t occur to Web3 developers that Linking the identity of users with a wallet could be a problem. Even that worsens the already existing privacy problem.
The equivalent of how Web3 works in Web2 would be that, to access platforms, for example, social networks, we use our bank account; and also that that bank account, its balances and transactions, be visible to everyone. If it seems crazy to us in Web2, why would we think that it is different in Web3?
And it’s not that this problem in Web3 has no solution. In fact, There are several possible solutions, although they are not yet implemented. One of them would be to build Web3 on blockchains in which a user is not equal to an address, such as Bitcoin. If a private key derives infinitely many addresses, it is perfectly plausible to use that private key as access to Web3 services, since it does not reveal anything about the user’s balances. Transactions are always made with derived keys that cannot be linked to the primary key.
Another possible solution would be to use a chain where balances are private by default, but can be revealed to select users through a special keyas in Monero. A third may be to use smart contracts and transactions based on zero-knowledge proofs, which do not reveal information about amounts or identities. These options are not mutually exclusive, they could even be implemented all at the same time.
In any case, Web3 is going to have to improve a lot before it can be a viable model to be used universally on the internet, not purely and exclusively as something crypto or DeFi.
Privacy is not being invisible all the time
Web2 has put us in a dilemma: on the one hand, we can indulge in a more comfortable life depending on services that know us in detail and offer us what we need in exchange for complete docility; On the other hand, we can disconnect from all of them and live in the shadows without anyone being able to reach us, for better or worse.
The reality is that This does not have to be a binary choice, as many suggest.: “Why try to hide me if they already have all my data?”; “I’m not going to use any services that are hosted on AWS.”
Privacy is not about hiding everything and seeking the highest degree of anonymity all the time. privacy It’s about being able to choose what to share and with whom.. It’s not all or nothing. By making use of privacy techniques, especially compartmentalization, we can have a segmented and effectively online presence. be different people for each context.
The items you buy on a site don’t have to influence the ads you see on a streaming site. The videos you watch streaming don’t have to interfere with your search results. Or yes, it’s your decision. Take control of your data and make services work for you and not the other way around, that’s what it’s about.
At some point we will reach the supremacy of Web3 and self-sovereign identity. But meanwhile, let’s take control in Web2.