Hey everyone.
My name is… not important. For the purposes of having a by-line that you can attach some kind of identity to, I’ve semi-randomly chosen Alan Smith, which Wikipedia informs is the name of a lot more English footballers than I would have expected. But to give you an idea of where I’m coming from, here’s a bit about me.
I’m a psychology research student, working on my PhD after gaining my undergraduate and Masters degree in that area. I want to emphasise that my interest is in research psychology, not clinical. I have nothing but respect for clinicians, they do way more good every day than I ever will in my whole life (as well as have better job security and a better paycheck and emotional fulfillment and cultural approval), but I do not have the skills or temperament for that kind of work. It’s just not my strength.
But what I am interested in, as well as somewhat skilled at, is reading research articles, finding holes and strengths in theory, developing ways to test various hypotheses, and basically playing with ideas. I started out in physics and mathematics, largely because my school thought there were only two routes someone could go: rigorous hard science, or fluffy subjective art, and I’m even less an artist than I am a clinician. But once I got to university, I found physics a lot less compelling than I thought, and happened to be doing a psychology elective at the time. So I decided to change focus to psychology until I found something more interesting. That has yet to happen.
(Please don’t ask me any physics questions. I haven’t even read a physics book for more years than I care to name, and my understanding of math is … well, it’s not quite as degraded but it’s still pretty bad.)
Most of my past work has been around the concept of identity and self-concept - how people see themselves, how we construct our self-image and such. Which is very interesting and relevant work which is starting to get some more attention in research, but honestly no university wants to hire you or fund work in the area, and what little there is is… well, academia is brutally competitive, and I’m just not up to snuff.
My current work is instead looking at privacy. How do people conceptualise privacy, generally as well as online? How do they conceptualise various types of personal information? How do these factors predict what privacy-protective behaviours people engage in? At time of writing I haven’t yet started gathering data on that, but I hope to do that soon.
This blog will talk about privacy from a perspective I don’t see a lot of discussion around - that is, from the psychological perspective. Not technical - I’m not going to be able or willing to explain how a Sybil attack on the Tor network works - and not political. I’m also not especially interested in “advocating” for privacy - I do believe it’s important, of course, but honestly if I can’t convince my friends to use Signal rather than SMS despite it being just objectively better I’m not a good advocate.
This will include my reflections on privacy aspects, as well as my observations on the garbage fire that is the privacy “community”. There are a lot of really cool and helpful and great people within that space, of course, I’ve talked to a few of them. But it’s also stuffed full of pretentious people, clinically paranoid people who need to talk to a therapist and maybe take their meds, people who can put together servers from raw copper and plastic but who think “threat modelling” is just a way to flex, way more shills for different companies and projects than I anticipated, and just the usual Internet low-grade (and occasional high-grade) lousy people. As with all online communities, I suppose.
Because I know someone’s going to bring it up: yes, this is on Substack. There are a couple of reasons for that.
Because I can not figure out how to self-host something, and even if I could I have insufficient confidence that my system would not go down, or my router wouldn’t shoot itself in the head, or any of a number of other things. Do not tell me “oh, it’s easy!”. No. I’ve tried, it was a colossal amount of effort and I failed miserably. Say what you will about Substack, but it works and it’s easy. I know it’s common to say “I’m not really technically savvy” while actually being pretty capable, but I’m… well, I’m probably better than the average, but really that says more about the average person than anything remarkable about my ability.
Because if I decide to try to monetise this some day, it being already on Substack makes it easier. I don’t really expect this to be viable, but it’s nice to have the option if I’m wrong. I know acknowledging this is a faux pas, but I figure better to be honest. And if it doesn’t, Substack works as well as anything else, and I haven’t found any major privacy issues with Substack apart from the time someone forgot the difference between CC and BCC. Which, yes, not ideal, but strikes me more as “silly mistake” rather than “corporate malevolence”. This will probably change, but eh. That’s what RSS feeds are for, after all.
Honestly, Substack is just a good blogging platform. It’s easy to use, the interface is nice and clean, it gives you good control over comments etc should someone be unreasonably nasty.
Apart from an abortive attempt to do a horror movie blog about whatever movies I happened to watch that week if I thought I had something to say about it, my knowledge of blogging is very limited. So of course, any useful suggestions welcome! The vast majority of my experience in writing is in a solid academic manner, which means I’m very much a windbag who takes 1,000 words to clear my throat.
So, yes. Hello. Welcome to Psyvacy.