Comment by IanCal
3 years ago
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.
3 years ago
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?
>I write a thing and let you read it.
By the why the physical universe you live in works the moment you let someone see an informational project (text for example) you no longer have a monopoly on that information. You can never remove access of that data from my mind, and with digital information under a end to end encrypted channel (and assuming you're not watching it with an OCR application from a monitor) you can't remove access to any other allowed person.
You have an extreme position, yes. It is extreme in the sense your idea only works in highly controlled situations or where everybody agrees to play nice. These rules do not work on the internet and there is no means or way of enforcing it.
Once you let photons go, you no longer have a permanent and fundamental right to recall it.
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> 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.
But that's more of a forum or a publication than an interpersonal communication. I think when you and I talk, we both own the content. The conversation is two-way, and thus it is ours. You have no right to take those conversations from my email server any more than removing them from my mind.
It's not about one-to-one or one-to-many, it's about is the conversation one-way or two-way. Are you talking to someone or with them?
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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.
> Chat messages derive from physical mail, not phone calls
Chat messages are not physical things and trying to apply laws that are based on important distinctions with regards to physical things to features in an application is not useful. Even then, you can still send someone something but retain rights over it.
> Those first phone calls were direct evolution of spoken conversation
Frankly I find it a little weird that a fast back and forth chat on discord over the internet is being likened more to sending a physical bit of paper with delays of multiple days per message than a chat over the phone.
First letter: Hi. Do you have a minute
Reply: Yes. What is it?
Second letter: I've got a problem.
Reply: Is this on the new product?
And it's a week later.
The name of it is even a chat message. To say chat messages are not like a chat is weird to me just because they're not audio files.
I strongly think either comparison is irrelevant but I'm quite surprised at the distinction you're trying to draw.
Worth remembering what the start of this was though, which was that deleting messages on discords servers was described as a feature.
In Washington, USA, both parties need to be aware of the recording. It's why many IVR systems announce "this call may be recorded".