Small differences eventually become a difference in kind.<p>We are used to thinking about concepts like &quot;in public&quot; and &quot;spying&quot; in traditional human-scale situations. Many of our cultural and legal structures implicitly assume human-scale limitations; we understand that you lose your expectation of privacy when a conversation moves from inside your house to the public shared spaces like the street.<p>We are also used the spread of information as something that has noise, limited reach, and having a cost that limits both how far the information spreads and how long it lasts.<p>Combined, this mean it was <i>usually</i> easy say things that might <i>technically</i> be public, but in practice were <i>de facto</i> a private conversation. This is great for kids, who are still learning how society works, risk assessment, and how they want to express themselves publicly. Children <i>need</i> this kind of sorta-public, in-practic-private environment so they can learn and develop. This will often involve <i>making mistakes</i>. A vast majority of the time we simply call this &quot;being a kid&quot;. The public side of the situation allows for a parent&#x2F;teacher&#x2F;whatever to (hopefully) offer education when a kid makes an embarrassing or rude comment - or a post that could be interpreted as threatening - while the transient nature means the child can move on having learned from their mistake.<p>What is happening right now is that the underlying assumptions are changing. Information no longer goes away. Far more is recorded and the de-facto-private aspect of many situations is being eroded. In some situations, it&#x27;s already gone. When life is recorded as the norm, there is no room for mistakes, no allowance for growth, no room to discover by experiment0 how social expression works. We already see this on the internet ever time someone complains about hostility in forums, &quot;cyber bullying&quot;, and even the moderation drama here on HN.<p>This means we need new definitions for what &quot;in public&quot; or a &quot;public post&quot; means. We really need entire new social structures to deal with this <i>brave new world</i> of computing and data. This will take time to convert. I don&#x27;t know what those social structures should look like, but I do know that applying pre-information-age heuristics to modern internet-based, always-recording situations <i>isn&#x27;t</i> the answer.<p>TL;DR - see CGP Grey&#x27;s recent discussion of why precedent matters: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=e-ZpsxnmmbE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=e-ZpsxnmmbE</a>