I think the idea is that messaging follows typical human offline communication patterns.
If I tell you something in person, you may remember it for some time, but it's not recorded forever. It exists only in your and my mind. I may misremember or forget it, you may too, and there's no way to know the original message. And there's no way to share that communication. Showing a screenshot of what someone said, is entirely different from saying someone what you heard from someone else. That's why we have contracts because "I said, you said" was never meant to be permanent or enforceable.
This is a feature, not a bug. If human conversations were to be permanent, they would be much less said or written. Messengers, especially private messengers, are a loophole, in a sense that they keep forever what people still unconsciously think of as ephemeral communication, and it's good that Telegram is trying to address it; though I'm not confident how effective it may be.
A friend sent an expiring 5-second photo to me in 2018, and to prove a point, I redrew that 1:1 a few weeks ago and showed it to her, because I think expiring messages are bullshit.
In the real world, I won’t forget the messages you tell me either, the memories are forever. Why should a digital message expire when memories don’t? I can still remember what my first day of school was, why shouldn’t I be able to see the messages I got sent last week?
>Why should a digital message expire when memories don’t?
I'm curious if you understand that your memories don't expire, but that almost all other people's do? I'd be interested to know if you think the platforms should conform to how your brain works, or if you think most brains work like yours. Just so you know, most people can't remember 99% of conversations verbatim that are years old.
> hy should a digital message expire when memories don’t?
In that case, why do you need a digital message if you remember everything? You also don't have any extra recording on personal communication except your (and the counterpart) memory, why it should be any different for digital messages?
> This is a feature, not a bug. If human conversations were to be permanent, they would be much less said or written. Messengers, especially private messengers, are a loophole, in a sense that they keep forever what people still unconsciously think of as ephemeral communication, and it's good that Telegram is trying to address it; though I'm not confident how effective it may be.
If this premise were true encrypted unscreenshotable apps would be the norm for communication.
So that they can’t reshare? This is almost always why DRM is used. Just because I want to share some content with you doesn’t mean I want you to be able to share it with someone else.
Why do you believe that once you share a message you should continue to have control over it? That’s not what sharing means.
Not to mention it won’t work. If they read it nothing is stopping them from simply telling someone else, drm or not. This technology will not prevent anyone from simply handing over their phone - and your messages - to someone else.
This just goes back to what the original person said about "Building walls in physical world is also very stupid hehe"
It's entirely reasonable to create a system designed to allow people to share things once, and indicate to others that they don't want it spread any further. It's reasonable to design software which attempts to honor such requests by introducing friction, making it 95% effective despite knowing that 5% of people will be able/willing to work around it.
Most people are "path of least resistance" and are too lazy to work around something like this, which is exactly the point. Pretty much every person using such a system is aware that the recipient could just take a picture of the phone with a camera.
Your analogy is not relevant at all to the situation.
It's completely reasonable for someone to give you a letter or photo of a personal nature and ask you not to share it (or simply expect you to understand that it's not to be shared). In the physical realm, the honor system comes into effect. In the digital realm, there's nothing wrong with adding an imperfect layer of accountability/protection to greatly reduce the chance that it becomes shared.
It’s perfectly relevant. It’s literally the analogous situation. There’s nothing special about the so-called digital realm.
The same expectations and honor system you described can be upheld in the “digital realm”. The only difference is that people have the arrogance to try to force things upon “digital” users because they can.
And also, I never said the gift was physical in nature.
It's not just about messaging. Although, I'm not sure I agree or disagree about your idea of message ownership, or lack of it; I've got mixed feelings about it.
I think it also comes down to wanting to own the "distribution" chain.
Example scenario (made up, so might have flawed reasoning): If I have an official following on Telegram where I post my art, and there's a fan/knock-off Twitter account reposting my art without my permission. I don't have many ways of stopping them. I could send a DMCA notice, but that's slow and doesn't prevent someone from reopening their knock-off distribution channels. DRM creates friction for most people that they won't even bother thinking about setting up a sidestepping distribution channel that fragments my audience.
Also to add (edit): being perfect isn't the point. I mean, most habits or ways we do things _every day_ aren't even close to optimal; much less perfect. If we threw out everything that's not perfect, we'd be left with nothing.
You don’t really need an example scenario - just take YouTube, the largest source of creator content - it does nothing to prevent you from sharing the videos.
Ultimately if you feel like you’re being wronged DMCA should be used and not a programmatic approach simply because a program has no notion of who was right to begin with.
So in your example you say “my art”, but what if it were not? Should you not be able to post “your art?”
I believe people should handle people issues and computers handle, well, the other stuff.
There is an enormous difference between a tie rack (or any commodity, including digital ones) and a letter or photo of a personal nature. There is nuance in this situation that has to be understood and recognized in order to evaluate why the feature exists and if it provides value.
There's an enormous difference between a physical object, which has inherent scarcity; and information, which does not. We strongly enforce property rights on physical objects because since they are scarce, theft is possible (if a person acquires a physical object then someone else acquires it, it is necessary that the original acquirer no longer possesses it - therefore either it was a gift, or it was paid for in some manner, or the second acquisition was theft). The notion of theft of information was invented by politicians due to an utter lack of creativity with respect to how to incentivise the creation of a non-scarce resource. While physical property rights are rights in the positive sense (they grant owners of physical objects the right not to have those objects removed from them without due consideration), intellectual property rights are rights only in the negative sense (they grant the owners no inherent abilities they did not already have, instead they only restrict the freedom of others by limiting their rights to acquire something that would otherwise be limitlessly abundant).
> Grandma gifts you a photo of her and her partner.
Which is a contrived example that conveniently sidesteps the two most relevant factors: the personal/intimate nature of the communication and the consequences of sharing it against the person’s will during a timeframe in which it would have an effect on the person's life.
> It's completely reasonable for someone to give you a letter or photo of a personal nature and ask you not to share it (or simply expect you to understand that it's not to be shared).
Yeah, and because I am a good friend, I will not share those photos with anyone, especially if they ask me not to. :)
Yes, that's exactly what I said. The feature is designed to address the "somewhat bad friend" case, not the "terrible friend" case. Both of those kinds of people exist in the world.
Reducing the chance of something that you didn't want shared from being shared by a factor of X% is better than nothing. Try to step out of black-and-white thinking for a minute. Just because something is not perfect doesn't mean it's useless.
I'm personally disgusted by tools which actively attempt to prevent someone from doing something which I myself can bypass just because I have the knowledge to do it.
Yes, your example of trying to prevent someone moderately bad from sharing something personal to you which you don't want shared is reasonable. The trouble is, you can use the same mechanism for much less reasonable and more nefarious, corporate things.
So the end result is that we're not to have moderately nice things, lest they be used as a weapon against user freedom by a mega-corporation.
I wonder how many people it actually stops from saving or sharing. If they want to save, they will. If they want to share, they will. I know you are talking about some people who want to save or share but is too lazy to take a screenshot or take a photo with whatever they can.
It's not about sharing, it's about proof of provenance.
If I say "Alice told me this", there is no proof that it actually happened; Alice can deny it. If I forward the message or show you a screenshot, then the case that the communication happened is significantly stronger. (Of course screenshots can be doctored, but that's another problem)
That's mostly what this is about - reducing the chances for accidental or willful disclosure to third parties.
> If I forward the message or show you a screenshot, then the case that the communication happened is significantly stronger. (Of course screenshots can be doctored, but that's another problem)
How is it another problem? If the method purports to be able to strengthen claims of veracity, but immediately after you demonstrate it to be vulnerable to spoofing, then it offered nothing in the first place. It's exactly the same problem.
Exactly. When you share something, that information is out and you have no control over of it. Plus, why would my friend want to share and then un-share something, or why would I want to do that to someone? The answer is that it is not for the regular people, it is to protect creators and such, not some regular Joe. Telegram is targeting a particular audience with this change. That said, I am pretty sure it will not be successful because I have access to a lot of creators' stuff through the Internet, be it music or books. If people want to save or share stuff, they will find a way.
While I an certain the current state of affairs of having DRM and personal privacy is unstable in the face of even the tech we had 10 years ago, we still have a strong personal need for control over our information and our works.
Not true! We have no personal need for control over our information, as the utter lack of legal protections for personal privacy and personal information collection make abundantly clear. And works? Are you kidding me? Have you seen a typical corporate IP assignment agreement? This has nothing to do with persons (which the laws are making increasingly clear are irrelevant), and everything to do with corporations and their shareholders.
I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic or attempting a joke here?
The EU, where I live, absolutely does have legal protections for personal privacy and personal information collection, hence GDPR and all the cookie popups[0].
And even if the law was silent, that wouldn’t itself be evidence of a lack of need, as people died from lack of workplace health and safety regulations well before there were laws about that.
And while IP assignments are an interesting suggestion to raise, I counter that I have also seen a forum of users who didn’t read the T&C and suddenly realised $corporation had the eternal right to reproduce whatever they wrote on that forum (kinda necessary but clearly non-obvious to most normal people), which demonstrates that people definitely feel strongly attached to even really dumb and low-value works if they are those works are their own.
[0] that they adhere to the relevant law about as well as all the YouTube videos saying “no copyright intended” adhere to IP laws is an enforcement problem, not a lack of rights
Given that most DRM these days is implemented in the apps that license the content, I'm not sure this is remotely true. Maybe in the disc era there was truth to this, but even then I'm not sure that it was a greater concern than lost revenues due to piracy.
Just because you want to share something doesn't mean you should. You cannot control what people will do, nor should you be able to control their actions by limiting their freedoms. Either you trust them or you don't.
If by TLS you mean the whole encryption and signing of http content etc, then I would argue it's the same. The purpose is to have an immutable and untamperable pipeline of data straight from the "server" to your "eyeballs". The cat definitely came out of the bag with tech enabling so much that was difficult in the real-world, and now they're busy scrambling to put it back, and I would argue, using "privacy" and "safety" as a Trojan horse.
Edit. Side note seeing as I don't think I 100% addressed your point. If we allow data to be viewed, and relayed with the potential for altering, then they no longer have 100% control over the content being changed/recorded. So viewing and sharing (with potential edits) is akin to tampering with the pipeline. Sharing is not at issue, it's you being able to intercept and have control over the data on your device.
Now I'll go scurry off and take my tin-foil hat off for the day.
With messaging inherently you are trying to share with others. If you’re sharing why stop saving?