TsuyokuNaritai
Active member
Imagine a woman goes to a website to discreetly buy a pregnancy test. The site invites her to enter her email into a payment web form for a 10% discount.
Days later, at work, she overhears that she wasn’t considered for a promotion because they found out about the pregnancy test. Apparently a list of email addresses of customers who bought it is publicly accessible on the web, and searchable on Google. Anyone who knows her phone number can search and find out about her private affairs.
She confronts the company, and they laugh at her. They say that’s just how that particular web form works - it broadcasts all emails of customers and sellers entered into it to the world. They say it wasn’t their responsibility to warn her, and that if she’d taken the time to fully research and understand how that type of web form works before using it, she’d have known that purchases made with it could only be private if she used an email address not tied to her identity.
Is that fair? Shouldn’t the company have pointed this out when they presented the web form? Especially when there are other web forms they could have used that are perfectly capable of not broadcasting her secrets to the world.
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It’s sometimes easy to forget that many things about crypto are frequently not well understood by the general public. It needn’t matter when buying alpaca socks, but when it's a transaction where privacy matters the facts should be made clear. It’s well known that many users don’t understand that they’re broadcasting their financial activities to the world. By assuming that customers will just automatically know this, businesses are negligently exposing customers and clients to privacy risks.
Any business selling a product or service where privacy may be important, and accepting non-private crypto as payment, has an ethical obligation to clearly explain the implications of this for their customers' privacy.
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Do you agree, and if so, what would be the best way of getting the message across?
We would need to handle it carefully. Here’s what we don’t want to do:
Days later, at work, she overhears that she wasn’t considered for a promotion because they found out about the pregnancy test. Apparently a list of email addresses of customers who bought it is publicly accessible on the web, and searchable on Google. Anyone who knows her phone number can search and find out about her private affairs.
She confronts the company, and they laugh at her. They say that’s just how that particular web form works - it broadcasts all emails of customers and sellers entered into it to the world. They say it wasn’t their responsibility to warn her, and that if she’d taken the time to fully research and understand how that type of web form works before using it, she’d have known that purchases made with it could only be private if she used an email address not tied to her identity.
Is that fair? Shouldn’t the company have pointed this out when they presented the web form? Especially when there are other web forms they could have used that are perfectly capable of not broadcasting her secrets to the world.
____________________________________________________________________________________
It’s sometimes easy to forget that many things about crypto are frequently not well understood by the general public. It needn’t matter when buying alpaca socks, but when it's a transaction where privacy matters the facts should be made clear. It’s well known that many users don’t understand that they’re broadcasting their financial activities to the world. By assuming that customers will just automatically know this, businesses are negligently exposing customers and clients to privacy risks.
Any business selling a product or service where privacy may be important, and accepting non-private crypto as payment, has an ethical obligation to clearly explain the implications of this for their customers' privacy.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Do you agree, and if so, what would be the best way of getting the message across?
We would need to handle it carefully. Here’s what we don’t want to do:
- We don’t want hurt crypto or give people another reason to bash it. Non-private crypto is perfectly fine as long the businesses show due diligence in protecting customer privacy by ensuring they are being made aware of the implications. But at the same time, it’s good and right to highlight legitimate concerns and risks that customers & businesses face when using non-private cryptos. It’s about making sure customers are rightly informed of the issues and that alternatives exist.
- We don’t want to bring the law into it, except perhaps as a counterargument to FUD about the legal status of private crypto. Yes, business that ask customers to pay in non-private crypto without explaining the implications to clients/customers when there's a reasonable expectation of privacy may be recklessly exposing themselves to legal implications in some jurisdictions. And not even bad laws either, valuable laws that protect the privacy of ordinary citizens. But business owners with intelligence will figure that out themselves, we don’t need to play that card. It should be about honest, well informed trade between free citizens. It's ironic though how private cryptos have been repeatedly beaten over the head with allegations of illegality and nefariousness by some supporters of non-private cryptos, when in truth it's the other way around.
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