Re: Why we really can't use Facebook for technical discussion.

[Bron Gondwana <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, Jun 6, 2021, at 08:34, Dean Willis wrote:
> I hereby propose we censor Facebook engineers in IETF meetings for promoting stupidity.

While this is clearly ridiculous, it does raise a better deep question about using central identities which treat you as a single entity and can take an off-colour joke that you made in the relative privacy of a group of friends, mis-categorise it as dangerous or hateful, and use that to stop you doing anything in any context.

This comes up more often with Google's massively federated set of properties than with Facebook, e.g.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/google-users-locked-out-after-years-2020-10

But it's something to consider if we make Github more central to our workflow.  Right now I believe Github accounts are completely separate from the rest of Microsoft, but over time I could imagine them being integrated with Microsoft's trust and safety systems such that an issue on a totally unrelated service caused somebody's Github account to be locked out along with all the repositories that they own/have created.  Less of an issue for git repositories themselves because they're more likely to be mirrored and at worst you can rebuild from the last draft uploaded to the datatracker - but if we are keeping significant state in the issue tracker, losing the issues for a draft could significantly hamper the work of a group.

Bron.

P.S. back on censorship - there's rarely need to censor anybody permanently, if just locking them out for the duration of a meeting in which consensus is declared on something they disagree with gets the job done.

--
  Bron Gondwana, CEO, Fastmail Pty Ltd
  [e-mail]