[OSM-talk] Archiving conventions on public communication channels (was: OSM US Trails Working Group)

[Christoph Hormann]

> Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch> hat am 11.10.2021 14:08 geschrieben:
> 
> Naturally recording conversations without consent (and all the issues 
> that in turn come with that) is not without its legal issues, so I 
> wouldn't actually expect publicly available logs of conversations 
> outside of times that recording has been explicitly declared.

I always found it remarkable how this argument very frequently turns up on synchroneous channels (like IRC, telegram, slack) but never on asynchronous channels (like mailing lists, forums).  AFAIK i was never asked for consent to the publication of my mails when signing up to a mailing list.  I am not sure what the basis is for making a fundamental legal distinction there, especially since the distinction between synchronous and asynchronous channels can be messy and many synchronous channels (not IRC but others) also allow some level of asynchronous participation (i.e. you have access to content that was posted when you were not live on the channel).

Of course you could argue that the distinction is not synchronous vs. asynchronous but if the public archive is already in operation at the time the user signs up and therefore they are aware of and give implicit consent to publication of their communication there.

Independent of that the idea that while a channel is open to the public and everyone on the channel can (and often does) maintain a private archive of the conversations and can refer to it as needed those private archives are exclusive to the individual participants and only date back as far as the individual (passive) participation seems a very elitist convention to me.

--
Christoph Hormann
https://www.imagico.de/