comp.society.privacy

The group and its era

The group was created in April 1992 by the formal Big Eight procedure, its creation vote passing 189 to 16. It arrived attached to something older than itself: the moderated newsgroup was one face of an Internet mailing list, the Computer Privacy Digest, which had grown out of an earlier Telecom Privacy digest and was run in these years by Dennis G. Rears. A RISKS Digest notice of 9 November 1992 records the arrangement — the digest “is gatewayed to the USENET newsgroup comp.society.privacy” — and the issues surviving from that winter carry the machinery on their faces: a numbered masthead, a submissions address, a note of where back issues were kept.

That double life is what a resource list is recording. A reader with a newsfeed subscribed to the newsgroup; a reader without one subscribed by mail and received the same articles as a numbered bulletin, which is why a privacy organisation listing the group long afterwards could still note that it was reachable by e-mail as well as by news. Every issue repeated the charter in its trailer: effects of technology on privacy.

The group ended by the machinery that had made it. A removal proposal went to last call in January 2010 and the result was announced on the seventeenth of that month. The reason was procedural: probe posts to the group bounced, the moderator’s address of record by then sitting at a university rather than the army host of 1992. Eighteen years after the vote, the comp.* hierarchy closed the entry.

What was discussed

Moderation, in a digest group, means something narrower than approval: an article was not posted but submitted, to an address that reached a person rather than a news server. The moderator set aside what was off-charter and assembled the rest into a numbered issue that went out as a single article. Nothing appeared on posting. A contribution waited for the next issue, which in the surviving run from December 1992 went out most days, carrying about ten items; and every contribution acquired a stable address, a volume and issue number, which is the unglamorous reason an organisation could cite the thing at all.

The RISKS notice called it a relatively open, less tightly moderated forum, and an issue from that December bears the description out. It runs to first-hand consumer reports — a reader refusing a supermarket’s demand for an address before it would hand over a prize — alongside a contested question about whether telephone companies logged local calls, a discussion of driving licences whose magnetic stripes carried the holder’s Social Security number, and a correction addressed to the moderator himself. The filter was for topicality and temperature, not for position.

The subject matter followed the law’s uneven arrival. Europe legislated comprehensively with the Data Protection Directive of October 1995; the United States legislated sector by sector, so that a health-records statute of 1996 produced a privacy rule binding most of those it covered only from 2003; Australia, whose readers arrive here by way of a resource page, extended its 1988 Act to much of the private sector by an amendment commencing in December 2001. Around the statutes ran the standing subjects: workplace and state surveillance, identifiers, medical files, the web. The unmoderated end of the same conversation is described at alt.privacy.

Context

The comp.society.* branch existed to treat computing as a social question rather than a technical one, and it was unusually full of edited publications. Contemporary lists show the parent group for the impact of technology on society, one for computer folklore and culture, one for computer technology in developing countries, and comp.society.cu-digest, whose sole business was carrying the Computer Underground Digest. Several, this one included, were marked moderated: the branch’s characteristic object was not a thread but an issue.

Its nearest neighbour of that kind sat outside the branch. The RISKS Digest, begun in 1985 by Peter G. Neumann for the ACM’s Committee on Computers and Public Policy, reached Usenet as comp.risks — a newsgroup existing for no purpose except to carry it. Between them the two digests did the network’s conscience work at a deliberate pace: one on what computers do to safety and reliability, the other on what they do to persons.

Hence the pairing that brings most readers here. The Australian Privacy Foundation’s list of newsgroups names comp.society.privacy, alt.privacy, alt.privacy.spyware and comp.risks together, the archive here noted as reaching back to 1992 — the year of the vote. Anyone compiling such a list faced one subject at two temperatures and had no reason to choose. The moderated group offered a citation and a considered reading of a document; the unmoderated one offered whatever people thought, at the speed they thought it. A researcher wants both.