Social media

[Dave2002]

Those are all private messages. Twitter and Instagram do have a public-facing social media function and I use them to follow events & people. I never post personal stuff, though have been known to issue the odd public tweet

Email is supposedly private - private in the sense of sending a post card through the mail, which everyone who is involved in delivering it along the way will read. Gmail is one which I use - but it was pointed out to me years ago that if I used sentences like "going out for a beer and a curry in a few hours" in an email, that within a very short while I'd be seeing adverts for beer and Indian restaurants in my area. I didn't believe this at first, but we did a few simple tests, and indeed that does seem to be the case.

Do not assume that any communication by email or via any web site is secure. One solution is perhaps to use encryption before sending any message, though in some jurisdictions that may contravene other regulations.

The best solution is never to write or send any message which you are not prepared for anyone and everyone to read, but sometimes that is hard.

[LeMartinPecheur]

I'm another committed non-user of all three I just about have a presence on LinkedIn, mainly to stay in touch with news from former professional colleagues now I've retired.

[Frances_iom]

Are you suggesting that everyone INSIDE academia is 100% benign ?

(asking for a friend)

no but within any 'closed' community bad actors once known tend to be ostracised by the community - mud sticks and sh*t sticks better and the smell affects colleagues

[Frances_iom]

.... One solution is perhaps to use encryption before sending any message, though in some jurisdictions that may contravene other regulations..

PGP on Linux will provide this but you need to have all parties having the required program - even then tho the destination + much metadata is unencrypted - likewise the metadata sent in headers as part of web browsing give away much info (eg your personal choice of extensions etc, fonts used can give your browser a unique id.
One way to avoid commercial spying is to use Tor tho I suspect this might add to your file held by the various security sytems

Google definitely uses any info it can see - read your T & C - basically assume if there is an American company anyway involved then you are the sucker in the middle.

[Nick Armstrong]

Email is supposedly private - private in the sense of sending a post card through the mail, which everyone who is involved in delivering it along the way will read.

Quite. I only used “private messages” to contrast with public posting of information or pictures. Perhaps ‘direct messages’ is a better term.

[Dave2002]

Dave - Unix did have security features - eg it marked file access rights as accessible to owner, owner's group + rest of world; it had a special user called root who had 'god powers' - all users had passwords; admittedly these were somewhat simple but recall unix would run on a PDP-9 which probably is equivalent in compute power to at best a model A raspberry pi - compute power was very limited and just could not support today's cryptographic based security features - however the BSD system (derived from Unix) is seen as today's most secure system.

It was the initial internet protocols that did not forsee a world with numerous bad actors who for various reason - theft, devilment or delight in wanton destruction - would emerge once the internet escaped outside of academia

I agree with the first part of this - though it wasn't enough. Apparently the very small group initially used to use the same machine(s) and even shared passwords, thinking they all trusted each other. That was apparently fine, until someone came along who violated that belief. The others hadn't seen that coming. This was even without communications level security.

Multics had much more complicated security features, but didn't penetrate as much as the sleeker Unix system. Other companies developed layered security systems, but most of the other software systems have disappeared, whereas Unix transmogrified into BSD, Linux and Android.