Some actions are legal and still reprehensible. People won't get punished by the state or the police but that doesn't protect them from scorn, disdain, harsh comments and insults. Actions have consequences.
Perhaps some people need to see it spelled out. I think when I was young I also needed somebody to tell me because when I grew up, I thought that the state is great, the law is great, and we're all good people. But morality, justice and the law are not the same. The law only concerns the things were the state will come and impose fines and punishment. Justice is the thing we aspire to (but which the state often cannot deliver). And the moral good goes further than that.
To be morally good or bad is different from being just or unjust and that is different from something being legal or illegal.
So please, when people say that something is reprehensible they usually don't care whether it was legal or not because they aren't going to call the cops. It's an occasion to be happy for just being called names, for only getting demeaned and ridiculed, for just getting inundated with mails and complaints. It's a learning opportunity because when the cops show up and take your stuff, when you get invitations to show up in court, when the bills start coming in, then it's worse. Much worse.
I've seen this a few times on fedi, now. Somebody thinks it's OK to index all the status messages for their search engine, ingest all the status messages for their sentiment analysis or for their training data, and then they're surprised when people get angry. A discussion ensues, and some people will say, hey, it was not illegal now, was it? Therefore there's no point in getting angry or acting surprised.
This misunderstands how humans manage to live together. When I was young and learned about hackers breaking into computer systems cheered for them because I didn't like the corporations. And if it wasn't illegal it was good or something like that. I was confused. But now, as I look around, I see defence in depth all around me. The garden fence has a gate that is trivial to jump over and to open, but to do so invites trouble. Whether jumping the fence is legal or illegal doesn't matter at first. Perhaps somebody runs away from bullies or creeps and they're welcome to jump that fence and escape. Things are negotiable. In a civilized world, many things need to happen before the state needs to get involved, and this is how it is supposed to be. Differences can be resolved.
A recent example of what I'm talking about:
A recent investigation by Liaizon Wakest revealed that Maven, a new social network founded by former OpenAI Team Lead Ken Stanley, has been importing a vast amount of statuses from Mastodon without anyone’s consent. – Maven Imported 1.12 Million Fediverse Posts, by Sean Tilley
Maven Imported 1.12 Million Fediverse Posts
People react harshly:
I can’t emphasize enough how much I would love if all the data centers containing the code running these things, across every network, just suddenly exploded. Take it all back to zero, and then put up a digital wall, like in Cyberpunk 2077 when they built a whole new internet that isn’t infested with garbage. – Hey It’s Maven! Who’s Maven?, by @cmdr_nova@cmdr-nova.online
"Move fast and break things" is shit advice.
"Act now and ask for forgiveness later" is shit advice.
It breaks all the good will accumulated so far and it'll take a lifetime to rebuild.
The advice that has been true for generations is: "Ask politely and respect the answers given".
So there's a difference in opinion in the fediverse on whether it's important to get consent to use somebody's public posts for a purpose they didn't originally intend it for: adding them to a search engine, using them as part of algorithmic recommendation systems, "bridging" them to another social networks, using it to train artificial intelligence systems, and so on. Some think this is just fine, or that it's enough to assume consent and give people the ability to "opt out" and withdraw consent. Others think that these uses should require informed, affirmative, "opt in" consent. – Eight tips about consent for fediverse developers, for @nexusofprivacy@mastodon.social, by @jdp23@blahaj.zone
Eight tips about consent for fediverse developers
#Philosophy #Consent
"While I wanted to support tool development for the platform, I recognize this approach violated principles of transparency and consent in data collection. I apologize for this mistake." -- Daniel van Strien, as quoted by Samantha Cole in Your Bluesky Posts Are Probably In A Bunch of Datasets Now, for 404 Media
Your Bluesky Posts Are Probably In A Bunch of Datasets Now
The guy is "a machine learning librarian at open-source machine learning library platform Hugging Face" and my hot take is that if the name of your platform reminds you of a face hugger, you should know that you are in fact one of the bad guys.
If you think you might one day be involved in the design or development of something, or overseeing something, or signing of some requirements for something, you need to learn about consent. Start by reading this short article:
We don't mean to cause harm and stress to others. It just happens, because it's about our success, our career, our growth, our connections to family and friends on networks built for surveillance capitalism. Our economic and political systems are reinforced by what we build. What we build is designed by our own experiences, our beliefs, and our politics. … This isn't a technical issue. It's a community issue, it is a human rights issue. -- Consent and the Fediverse part deux: The Opt-out two-shuffle, by Esther Payne (@onepict@chaos.social)
Consent and the Fediverse part deux: The Opt-out two-shuffle
If you don't understand, you will one day develop a solution that violates consent and you'll be out there, apologizing and not understanding how things could get out of hand so quickly: people accusing you of destroying their relationships, of facilitating identity theft, bringing stalkers and abusers back. It's not a good look and for some it's going to be hell. You don't want to be doing the devil's work.
I'm sure we could think of a particular solution where copyright law or some other law looks like it would have helped. I'm trying to drive a wedge into this argument. I think that the morality of a decision is different from the legality of a decision. A decision can be legal and one might still deserve all the scorn in the world for it. So many reprehensible things were legal at the time or still are, from the greatest atrocities in history, from crimes against the environment, down to the most common micro-agressions and bullying. The legal point of view is the absolute lowest denominator of every value we share, every aspiration we have, every moral standing we honour.
I think this is extremely important to emphasise because it's so easy to conflate in our world.
The conflation of morality and legality is why so many things these days are so wrong. Companies and people will do things to make money and the only thing that stops them is the law. Well, if that's the only thing that stops them, then we have sunk to the absolute lowest denominator of every value we share.
