21 votes

could we have a warrant canary sitting at the page footer?

Posted by temporalarcheologist
Tags: warrant canary, privacy, discussion, security

an actual picture of a canary would be cute and then if it's removed we know, or just a small line like the non-profit disclaimer is currently.

8 comments

  1. [4]
    Deimos
    Link
    Copy-pasting an old comment I wrote about this:

    Copy-pasting an old comment I wrote about this:

    It's an interesting question, and I honestly haven't researched warrant canaries very heavily, but my general feeling towards them is a bit negative because I don't think they're very useful.

    A few concerns/problems I have with warrant canaries in general:

    • The legal status of them is pretty questionable. A lot of the justification for them in the US seems to be based on the First Amendment, and since Canada's laws are a little different, it might be even more questionable here. I just found this article written by Jon Penney (a Canadian lawyer and a great guy that I've met and talked to a few times), and he doesn't seem very confident about the legal basis for them in Canada. I could probably contact him and talk to him about it more to see if his opinion's changed at all in the last few years.
    • They're kind of only usable once. Once you remove it, you can't really put it back. Even the people that support warrant canaries seem to think they get even more iffy if you start trying to increase the specificity of them (such as by re-adding a new one or narrowing down the date range).
    • Even in the cases where they've been used and removed, nobody seems to care and nothing happens. Reddit had one; it was removed a couple years ago. Was it removed because something actually happened, or did they just not want to have it any more? What did removing it actually mean? Regardless of the answers to those questions, as far as I can tell, nothing significant happened in response to it being removed. So was there even a point?
    22 votes
    1. [4]
      Comment deleted by author
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      1. [3]
        Deimos
        Link Parent
        Yeah, so like I said—if that's the ideal case, what was the actual result? A couple of articles that basically say, "Does this mean anything? We don't really know." and some privacy people saying,...

        Yeah, so like I said—if that's the ideal case, what was the actual result? A couple of articles that basically say, "Does this mean anything? We don't really know." and some privacy people saying, "Does this mean anything? We don't really know."

        I'm a pretty privacy-aware person, but I just can't convince myself that it's a meaningful thing to implement when that's the best result you can get out of it. It doesn't have no value, but it seems awfully close.

        You mentioned that some people said they'd change their behavior based on it disappearing, but why? If they were behaving in a way that they had something to worry about, they're potentially already screwed. The canary doesn't prevent anything from happening, it just says that (maybe) nothing's happened yet. So they never should have been behaving in a way that needed changing in the first place, or they've already put themselves at exactly the same level of risk.

        I don't know, I honestly feel like I must be missing something. What practical change can you make based on whether a site has a canary or not?

        9 votes
        1. [2]
          DadIsSnoring
          Link Parent
          I get that reddit didn't crumble and die when they removed their canary, but certainly some people decided to stop using reddit once it was removed. To me that was the death knell for reddit. So...

          I get that reddit didn't crumble and die when they removed their canary, but certainly some people decided to stop using reddit once it was removed. To me that was the death knell for reddit.

          So what practical effect does a canary have? It empowers people to make informed decisions.

          1. Deimos
            (edited )
            Link Parent
            As I said, that's not the case at all. If you're informed because of it, answer the most basic question possible: Why did reddit remove the canary? The best you can do is guess at the answer, with...

            As I said, that's not the case at all. If you're informed because of it, answer the most basic question possible: Why did reddit remove the canary?

            The best you can do is guess at the answer, with no ability to verify whether you're correct or even to rule out any of the possibilities. If you were truly informed, there wouldn't be any guessing involved.

            3 votes
  2. [5]
    Comment deleted by author
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    1. [5]
      Comment deleted by author
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      1. [5]
        Comment deleted by author
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        1. [4]
          temporalarcheologist
          Link Parent
          oh man i forgot about the whole five-eye thing, unrelated, but would you recommend any VPNs?

          oh man i forgot about the whole five-eye thing, unrelated, but would you recommend any VPNs?

          3 votes
          2. [2]
            Deimos
            Link Parent
            Personally, I use Mullvad and like it quite a bit.

            Personally, I use Mullvad and like it quite a bit.

            4 votes
            1. temporalarcheologist
              Link Parent
              that is really cheap and looks nice, thanks!

              that is really cheap and looks nice, thanks!

              2 votes