What advantages does your approach have over simply sending an anonymous email? Your idea looks to break down as follows:
pain: sometimes telling someone necessary causes an interpersonal friction because the recipient of the feedback is aware that the sender is observing / judging him on certain qualities.
solution: give a margin for error so the feedback can be sent/received, but both parties can pretend as if the message was never sent.
So again, what does your idea offer versus an anonymous service like http://www.sendanonymousemail.net/ (or any of the others; that was just the first google result).
While I would encourage you to continue to develop this, the fact that you're unable to easily and clearly describe your idea tells me that it's a little vague to you, as well. At least that's how it comes across.
Maybe you could try to explain by analogy? E.g., "ever wish you could send someone an email they could pretend to forget? well, try [blah blah blah]"
It is a good thought. For now people can do that by changing the text of the message. I didn't want to require people to enter their private information.
That does sound like a scary prompt, but it might also work as a filter of sorts. I certainly don't care enough about comments that scaring someone away will be a concern, especially as they can always just e-mail me, so I get to pay extra attention when someone does go through it.
I agree about some of your points, but I don't believe that you have any reasonable expectation of privacy when emailing a person you have never communicated with before or that they won't republish your emails without first gaining your permission (IANAL).
Nice article! One of the authors points was that people are not effected in their daily life through privacy problems (or at least that's what I read between the lines during that "dead bodies" metaphor).
So here's my idea: I'll place a warning in my email signature, that people should take care what they write to me because my email account is spied on and everything is recorded.
There are two points in this; first, it is quite accurate to reality, my (and everyone else's) email IS scanned for suspicious content for example. Second, it will shift the focus of people writing their text to this fact, that they are being monitored. This in turn should raise their awareness of the problem and put some effect on their life that they can easily perceive.
Wow that is a very original idea! Some risk of pissing off the person if they have already read my email asking for a deletion. And they would know my mom's company as it all came from that and complain or something. Worth the risk you think?
Agreed. My litmus test is, unless you can name a person, then the statement of intent is meaningless. E.g. when I get emails from 'corporate HR' I delete them without reading them.
You seem to be trying to implement plausible deniability in email. People are actually capable of rich probabilistic reasoning on communication, but not in the same way that you're thinking.
That is, making electronic plausible deniability more feasible is the kernel of an interesting idea but your implementation doesn't tap into human psychological hooks. Instead of "25%", if you showed pictures of four Facebook accounts and said "one of these sent you this message", that would get the effect you seem to desire. Might be an interesting viral dating site.
Another interesting variation could be for performance reviews or political/government statements. Anytime someone wants to send a message, has an identifiable group from which that message would be seen as legitimate, yet also wants to preserve a degree of plausible deniability...this could be interesting. Suppose someone wants to float a trial balloon to find out what "coming out" as a conservative on Facebook would do. Imagine the wheels turning when it just says "one of the following frienda posted this". It's kind of like the Crushlink scam...humans are fundamentally motivated to try to put a return address on certain kinds of sensitive communication.
Depending upon how sensitive I’d generally try to avoid written communications in general. It’s easy for even well-meaning friends, current or ex-workers to forward something without thinking it through.
Yeah. I was thinking politicians, corporate customer service departments etc. Put a header on each email saying "This email was sent to [politician name]@fullofcr.app"
Agreed, I seriously wouldn't recommend sending that information online at all, but the unfortunate thing is that some people send it through email anyway. A more appropriate use case would be to send a secret that isn't damning, but that you'd just prefer wouldn't stick around in someone's inbox.
Agreeing with the general tone below. The post gives the impression people should conceal even innocuous interactions. The basis is, of course, to have several email addresses and give the impersonal one, which receives most of the spam, to forum/club mailing lists.
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