Dissenter: Great Mission, but Privacy Concerns
Gab and Dissenter's mission is to allow alternative voices to be heard.
(Image provided by Free-Photos via Pixabay)
The Verdict
Bottom line: we love Dissenter and Gab's mission, but we don't like the defaults for Gab and Dissenter from a privacy perspective. We also don't like that anonymous aggregated information is shared with third parties, as this means the data isn't truly private.
What is Dissenter?
Dissenter is a new system brought to you by the creators of Gab, the alternative, anti-censorship social media platform. Dissenter can be used by going to dissenter.com, but the best way to use Dissenter is with their browser plugin. The system allows Web users to make comments on sites that simply cannot be censored by the site owners. The secret is that Dissenter doesn't actually make any changes to the sites themselves, but by cataloging website URLs and maintaining comments, it allows users to comment and allows other Dissenter users to see those comments when navigating to those pages. Users can also follow other Dissent users and they can automatically post their Dissent entries to Gab.
This app is making waves and Tom Woods interviewed Andrew Torba, the creator of Gab and Dissenter this past week. Here's that interview, in case you'd like to hear it. You can also go straight to Tom Woods' site for the interview (I am a Tom Woods fan, but EDG has no formal association with The Tom Woods Show).
As Andrew Torba observes, we see that comments sections on news sites are shut off by website owners more and more often. It's often because they don't like dissenting views that disagree with their own narrative. This fits in with the "fake news" red herring that dominant media platforms have used to label, attack, and silence alternative news sources holding views that don't agree with the mainstream narrative. These are the views that dominant search engines and social media sites are working to hide from your sight. The gate keepers want to maintain control over what you see and hear.
How Is This a Topic for Ethical Developer Group?
Ethical Developer Group's primary mission is to help users escape from the Digital Panopticon, by exposing privacy issues and sharing solutions to regain digital privacy. The ability to comment on content on dominant media platforms may not seem to be directly related. However, the media gatekeepers who want to silence opposing views are the very same ones that wish to track you, perform behavioral heuristics, and even influence or control your behaviors. This is true whether they are trying to convince you to buy certain products or the dominant media (and government) narratives.
Bottom line: The reason to ensure that people can comment on the media is ultimately the same reason that we want to protect our privacy. Dominant media (and government powers, which are often one-and-the-same) do not have the right to (1) gather your data, (2) analyze your behaviors, or (3) use what they've gathered to control your thoughts and behaviors. We need to regain the ability to comment on the media as badly as we need to regain our digital privacy.
Further, we will assess the privacy aspects of Gab and Dissenter in this article.
Privacy Policy
Now, we've discussed why the capabilities of Dissenter are important, but what are users giving up in order to use this service? Long long ago in a galaxy far far away "Don't be evil" was Google's motto, but we've written several articles on how they no longer hold to that basic value. If the creators of Gab get access to your browsing history, this gives them power that could be a corrupting influence. The missions of Gab and Dissenter are certainly ethical, but what about the Dissenter browser plugin?
Dissenter and Gab have a single privacy policy that covers both platforms (which are ultimately branches of the same). Here are some positive and negative features of this privacy policy. It should be observed that nothing in this policy (written in August of 2016) is specific to the Dissenter plugin, but until this is updated, we should assume that the same privacy system is in place for Dissenter that is in place for the rest of the Gab ecosystem.
Positive and Expected Features
Some of the following features are positive aspects of Gab and Dissenter's privacy policy. Several of them aren't really positive, but are actually expected as any company operating as a legal entity in the USA will be required to comply with certain legal requirements. The latter, again, aren't really positive, but they are to be expected.
Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is not shared, generally speaking. Exceptions include the user content and profile characteristics (username, display name, photo) that you would expect to be shared shared with other users. After all, Gab and Dissenter are social media platforms. Generally, this is limited to friends and friends of friends, but the latter can be disabled in your profile settings. Your email address isn't shared with anybody.
Because Gab may engage third parties for administering and providing services, such parties will have access to PII for those purposes alone.
Like any US-based company, Gab needs to share information as required by law enforcement and other authorities, including subpoenas; protecting their own rights/property; and to stop illegal or legally actionable activities.
Gab tracks user IP addresses, however they do not block VPN users. Most services do track IP addresses, these days, to protect themselves, and blocking VPN users is becoming more common, so this is actually a net positive for privacy.
PII is business asset that would be transferred if acquired by a third party or merger, etc. This is to be expected, or such mergers and acquisitions would result in shutting down the service that they were acquiring.
Negative Features
The features above are either good or they are neutral but expected. The features below work against your privacy online, so we consider them to be negative.
If you are running the Gab app, location information is tracked by default when the app is used. This can be disabled, but our standard for ethical software is that the user shouldn't have to take special steps to protect their information. We are assuming that the policy is the same for the Dissenter plugin, which may be tracking your location.
They state that third party service providers might also track and report information about how the app is used and collect information about your device, including your hardware, OS, and location. So, this additional reach moves them in the direction of Google. Again, we must assume a similar policy for the browser plugin, unless further clarifications are made.
Aggregated information and non-identifying information may be shared with 3rd parties for research & analysis, demographic profiling, and similar. Duckduckgo's Privacy Crash Course has an article on why anonymized data doesn't actually protect privacy. The bottom line is that with very limited information individual users can be identified, meaning that the privacy of such systems is questionable at best.
Plugin Permissions & Settings
As noted above, the Gab privacy policy doesn't have any content specific to their Dissenter browser plugin or service. This service was last updated in August of 2016, so an update is probably needed.
We can probably glean more about Dissenter's privacy by looking at what the (Chromium-based) Brave browser tells us about the plugin.
What we find right away is that the plugin, by default, has the option to read and change data on the websites that your browser visits. I haven't changed the options, so the default is that it has access to all of the sites that I visit. This is not a good default. I've now changed it to specific sites only, so that I select what they can and cannot see.
I'm glad to see that the defaults don't allow the plugin to access sites visited in Private mode, and that file URLs are not tracked by default.
Clicking on Extension options shows me options for scripts that allow the plugin to interact with Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc., which is to be expected for the commenting system to work.
Summary
We like the anti-censorship mission and opportunities that Gab and Dissenter are providing to allow user voices to be heard. While they are attacked by many who adhere to dominant media narratives, what is wrong with allowing people to speak their minds? If they don't like the content that gets published on Gab and Dissenter, they don't need to visit those sites. I will agree that I find a certain amount of the content on the site to be objectionable, but I also find a lot in the mainstream media just as objectionable. There is no exercise of free speech where objectionable, controversial viewpoints are not allowed. Protecting only unobjectionable non-controversial content means that free speech is not protected. Gab and Dissenter respect the right to free speech (a fundamental, natural, human right, well beyond the US Constitution forbidding Federal Government restrictions), and that should be applauded.
Meanwhile, we have strong reservations about their privacy policies, default (Gab) app settings, and default (Dissenter) plugin settings. We recommend making some changes to these settings and we would be among the first to call the Gab app and the Dissenter plugin Ethical privacy-based solutions, but at present we cannot recommend them to our readers.
If somebody chooses to use Gab and Dissenter, we recommend the the following actions to protect your privacy:
- For Dissenter, either use their website to access their features, or change the following browser plugin settings:
- Set it so that it only works with specific sites, then add them as needed for sites you want to comment or see comments on.
- For the Gab app:
- Shut off location tracking.
- Turn on the app only when you want to use it.
- For Gab itself:
- Use a browser like Brave, or other plugin tools that make it tougher for tracking across websites to occur.
- Shut off the ability for friends of friends to see your PII.
- Be careful what information you share, as even anonymized aggregated data can be used to identify individual users and collect information on their activities.
We would welcome updates on this, or any clarifications that the creaters of Gab and Dissenter would like to provide.
Final Words
Ethical Developer Group is very concerned about online privacy. We believe that the majority of Web users are compromising their private information every day by using wolf-in-sheep's-clothing services including Google, and normal operating systems like Windows and Android.
Please join us in learning about the threat and finding our way out of the Digital Panopticon by signing up for our email updates, becoming a user of the site, and showing your support of our mission on social media sites including LinkedIn and Twitter.
Thanks!
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://edgcert.com/2019/04/07/dissenter/