Comment by TeMPOraL
3 years ago
> and if their relationship with you has soured, they have the option of nuking their messages.
How is that a feature?
3 years ago
> and if their relationship with you has soured, they have the option of nuking their messages.
How is that a feature?
I think that depends on whether you think of a message you receive as belonging to the person who wrote it or the person who is reading it.
Neither. I find this a weird notion. The message belongs to both sender and recipients. All of them, in case of one-to-many communication.
If there's someone least entitled to message ownership, IMO it's the sender. To grant the sender the ability to take messages back is to allow them to encroach the "personal space" of the recipient - to make unilateral changes to the sphere of reality they considers their own.
Physical analogy: to "unsend" a letter, you'd have to break into my house and steal it.
Digital analogy: to "unsend" an e-mail, you'd have to break into my computer / mail server and delete it there.
"Unsending" e-mail exists in corporate (organizational in general) contexts, but this is tied to an artificial environment following a much different sense of rules - those e-mails aren't truly yours, they're the property of the company (org) as part of which you're communicating. In the same way, corporate might let you "unsend" a physical letter too, at least internally. But this is an exception, tied to acting as an agent of an organization; private communications have different defaults.
Also in general, as I mentioned in another branch of this subthread, I don't like solutions that let someone mess with someone else's perception of reality. "Unsending" is doing exactly that, so at the very least, it must not be silent - it must always leave a visible mark. "There was a message here. It was removed by the sender."
I agree with you. Analogously, I find the notion of forced read receipts to be weird. I can accept having a "delivered" status, to indicate that the message reached one of my devices, but a "read/seen" status is intrusive. The physical equivalent of this is sending an internet connected camera and let it send a message back if I opened your box.
This is very much a framing issue and trying to apply physical interpretations on non-physical things.
> Digital analogy: to "unsend" an e-mail, you'd have to break into my computer / mail server and delete it there.
They're not on your computer or mail server though. They're on discords servers, which grant you permission to view them upon you providing credentials to prove you're allowed to see them. Removing the message is removing your access to content I have authored and previously granted.
It wouldn't be weird for me to remove a blog or mastadon post of my own, yet those are very clearly one to many communications. If I hosted a page and gave you login details which I later rescinded, that wouldn't seem odd would it?
None of these are conceptually all that different though. I write a thing and let you read it. I later don't want you to allow you to read it any more. Having granted access once, must that always translate to permanent irrevocable permission? That seems like an extreme position - the most obvious place that comes up is with mistakes. I mistakenly "send" a message to you intended for my wife. Do you have a permanent and fundamental right to it? If you've not even seen a notification that it's arrived, is it encroaching on your personal space for you to not be able to read a message I don't want you to read?
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> Neither. I find this a weird notion. The message belongs to both sender and recipients.
If only we could admit that about copyrighted work.
I think there's some overlap with recording phone calls here; some people do it, but do you need to get consent for doing it?
Laws tend to vary quite a bit, but around here (not US or a lawyer, get your legal advice from someone else), you're allowed to record phone calls without mentioning it beforehand as long as you're a participant in the call itself.
Basically the law surrounding phone call recordings suggests that for all intents and purposes, that right belongs to both entities independently. I'd apply the same to chat messages; the right to store them without prior consent belongs effectively to both parties.
> Basically the law surrounding phone call recordings suggests that for all intents and purposes, that right belongs to both entities independently. I'd apply the same to chat messages; the right to store them without prior consent belongs effectively to both parties.
Note however, that the law around mail and postal services suggests no such thing - on the contrary, once you send something, you lose your rights to it; you may have some residual rights for the duration of delivery, since the post is performing a service for you, but once the mail reaches its destination, its owned by the recipient.
Chat messages derive from physical mail, not phone calls, so I'd apply postal rather than telecom perspective here. Phone calls are in some sense unique here: in its first widespread form, making a phone call meant creating a literal, direct electrical connection between your microphone and a speaker on the other end - an unbroken conduit going for dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of kilometers - in order to "teleport" the sound waves by means of converting mechanical waves to electrical waves, and back again at the other end - allowing to have a conversation across distance by pretending it isn't there. Those first phone calls were direct evolution of spoken conversation - as opposed to written messages, whose analogues were sent over a telegraph.
Thus, in my mind, the right framework to think about IM chats and e-mails alike is through analogy to written letters and "snail mail" (if you really insist e-mails and IMs are not alike, then treat e-mails as similar to letters, and IM chats as similar to tiny notes passed around in the class by children, while the teacher is not looking). For phone calls, the right analogy is conversation. That extends to VOIP, Teams calls, Mumble/Teamspeak, etc. If you want digital voice communication that has semantics of mail, and not conversation, then we have that too: it's called voice messages, and is a feature in most IM platforms.
To spell out clearly what that last point means to me: mutual consent for call recording sounds reasonable. But if you send me a voice recording over Messenger or WhatsApp, to me it's just as if you sent a normal chat - and therefore something that I'm free to back up without your consent or even without informing you.
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In Washington, USA, both parties need to be aware of the recording. It's why many IVR systems announce "this call may be recorded".
This is a feature because you can feel safer sending messages to people you currently trust that you are less comfortable sending to people you don't trust as much, knowing that you can delete these messages if your relationship with them starts to deteriorate and they likely wouldn't have access to them.
This is something I just can't feel. Maybe it's because I grew up with digital communications that did not have this "feature".
In more general sense, the way I see it, a message does not belong to the sender - the ownership is shared between the communicating parties, and neither one should get to unilaterally delete it for the other, much like when you send me a physical letter, I can't prevent you from making a copy of it prior to sending, but you also can't "unsend" it by taking it out of my mailbox or cupboard.
In more general sense still, I don't like things that can screw with people's sense of reality. At the very least, I hope "unsending" messages leaves a clear sign behind, because removing a message from someone's mailbox without leaving a trace is a stellar way to facilitate intentional or accidental gaslighting.
But I'm rambling again. The main thing that needs to be said:
> knowing that you can delete these messages if your relationship with them starts to deteriorate and they likely wouldn't have access to them
This is just a really bad case of a false sense of security. The other person can always make a screenshot. And if you're known to be a person that unsends their messages, or if this becomes a more common practice in general, then the other party will likely start making screenshots the moment they realize your relationship starts to deteriorate.
The messages still exist. For more serious cases, they can be dredged up from the backups by a court order, so you don't really get to unsend something and pretend it never happened.
> This is just a really bad case of a false sense of security. The other person can always make a screenshot.
Indeed, that's why I'm talking about people who you currently trust, and may not trust in the future. I will agree with you in part that there are situations even with currently trusted parties regarding certain information that it would be preferable that communication is permanent. There are modalities in communication where deletion is a feature and modalities where it isn't.
edit: The situations I'm thinking of where such communication is preferable are less like "divorce-worthy" stuff, and more like "I'm not vibing with person A well rn, I don't like that they like <trivial thing a> and <trivial thing b>", which is relatively low-stakes, but essential to friendship.
edit: here's a context I encountered yesterday; a friend (call them A) realized that some new people joined a Discord server that used to be close friends, and so A deleted their selfie pics. The reasoning (which happens intuitively and emotionally) is that if these people were slightly creepy, then they wouldn't be able to opportunistically abuse A's selfies if/when they started paying attention to A. If these people were massively and actively creepy there would be other avenues to handle that.
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This "feature" is placebo. All they have to do is save the data somewhere else and your "power" to delete the messages is gone. Simple screenshots will suffice.
Just as exploding messages are subject to retention by the other party. Yet the friction of doing so makes opportunistic abuse harder by somewhat trustworthy and decent people.
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