This is not a blog post I had planned to write - especially in the middle of an election, but blogging, for me, is meant to be about things you find interesting as you find them interesting. Nor is this a blog post which will answer the questions it poses - I don't think there are answers to some of the questions.

This morning a couple of ReTweets came up in my twitter stream from @glynmoody.

RT @alexanderhanff preparing a criminal complaint against Canonical over privacy concerns raised by logging/publishing of online chatrooms

RT @alexanderhanff all Ubuntu IRC Chatrooms are logged and those logs are published online. It is my belief this is in breach of RIPA >>thx

I was confused by this, I couldn't see an actual grievance here. There are two main ideas around this:

• IRC channels for FLOSS projects regularly form part of the governance/decision making processes, in interests of transparency logging and making public is a good thing.
• I consider IRC to be a public forum and FLOSS project IRC channels to be especially so but also to have a professional (as opposed to social) aim.

These mean that I don't have an expectation of privacy on these channels. I also don't have an expectation that I'm going to be discussing things I don't want to be public. Even in social IRC channels I visit I don't have an expectation that logging won't happen (I know it does, we have conversations about people clearing old logs from time to time) but I do have an expectation that the vast majority won't be made public (small quotes on bash.org ... maybe).

I'm also of the opinion that I don't matter (stop laughing at the back) and that I don't want to pretend I'm something I'm not (been there, done that). This however is just a version of the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" fallacy - it may be true in my case, my time and my environment but you cannot generalise from that. In days where companies google for you before employment and study your social network profiles before employing you, anything being made public needs to be considered carefully. I strongly believe that we have several different "lives" (public/private, social/professional as an initial list of axes, some people may choose to purposefully create more versions of any of these) and that we need to understand and help define how those aspects should be evaluated - particularly, a line of respect needs to be drawn between a person's public life and their professional life - this means things like understanding that Linked In and Facebook serve different purposes and different levels of professionalism and privacy should be expected). We've entered territory here that is re-defining our understanding of social and professional lives and privacy. And we are getting burned by it.

I am against the intrusion of CCTV into our daily lives. I am against government attempts to log and detail our every move (ID Cards + National Identity Register). Why is it that I treat IRC and the internet generally so differently? I think it boils down to the fact that I consider myself to be aware of my own place on these networks. However not everyone can or does share those same understandings or has thought about them. An elected officer in a student union has a profile on facebook, to me facebook is a personal social network, to them (and to other students) it is ALSO a public professional presence which means that as a staff member I have to be careful in my interactions as they can interpret something I see as very much a public social identity as a public professional identity. Mixing identities in this way can lead to all sorts of problems which need resolving. For example: should someone be sacked from their job because they say it is boring on a facebook status? Absolutely not in my opinion. The threshold for Social Public having an impact on professional life should be extremely high and well defined - the problem with that last example is that it doesn't meet that bar.

I don't think I can put this as in insidious plot by corporations and politicians to remove our privacy but I do think they're using tools to their advantage and not understanding the distinctions because as a society we haven't discussed them, we haven't understood them, our politicians haven't understood them (politicians not understanding something? I'm shocked I tell ye!). I may even be willing to accept that some are purposefully not engaging with the issue in the hopes it will advantage them but I don't see an active plot to undermine our privacy.

Maybe I'm too naive...

Finally, getting back to the original context, looking at the Ubuntu site, it isn't clear what logging is happening - you have to go to "List of all channels" and scoll down to find out about the logging bots before you find out anything - a more prominent position and clarification of the purpose may be appropriate. There will always be leaking of personal into professional ("Sorry, I'm off to my sister's wedding, can't do that bug fix until tomorrow") but an understanding is necessary. Publicising that is probably more important and worthwhile than preparing suit over the Canonical/Ubuntu example.

Alex
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