My moms message group has long been a comfort to me, especially in this pandemic year. It’s a place to wave, plan and strategize, and I’ve definitely said a lot of things I do not want to be shot in public.
I was thinking of my own potentially embarrassing messages on Thursday night. It was then that I saw the anonymous leaked texts of a chat group, including Heidi Cruz, the wife of Senator Ted Cruz. Through this leak, we learned additional details about the Cruz family’s trip that were not well advised.
The Cruzes were photographed on a plane to Mexico on Wednesday while many of the Senator’s voters in Texas did not have heat, water and power. Mrs. Cruz invited her neighbors to flee with her for the “FREEZING” weather, and discussed the rates at the Ritz-Carlton in Cancún. It was a disaster for Senator Cruz.
Whatever your position on Cruz’s politics, the chats have entered the internet discourse in a big way and fear into the hearts of those of us who would like to be confused in our texts. “Are we all in our group chats now and looking around and wondering who might be the ‘most likely’?” wonder Allison P. Davis, a writer at New York Magazine.
As political reporter Ashley Parker puts it in The Washington Post: ‘After all, groups of text chains are one of the most intimate and sacred forms of communication, and if you can not trust your’ friends’ to leak them, then who can you trust? ”
I decided to ask two experts about their thoughts on this very modern debacle. Were the leaks ethical? Do you have a reasonable assumption of privacy when you send the moms on your block, or do you have to assume that the world will know when you step into it?
Kwame Anthony Appiah, the internal ethicist of The New York Times Magazine and a professor of philosophy and law at the University of New York, said the situation considered me “a significant violation of the norms on confidentiality.” Although Ted Cruz is a public figure, he has done nothing terrible enough to justify a violation of such norms, Mr. Appiah said. We already knew that Senator Cruz undertook the trip to Cancún a day before the leak of the texts, and that his poodle, Snowflake, had been left at home in the cold.
The appiah said the public benefited from the additional information – which enabled people to know that Cruz was not honest when he implied that his trip would only last a day – breaking the value of the group has. . “It’s unwise to wander to a luxury hotel, ‘during a crisis in your state if you’re an elected official,’ but it’s not like killing someone, ‘” he said.
Catherine Price, the founder of Screen / Life Balance and the author of “How to Break Up with Your Phone”, had another way out. “It’s definitely not a fun thing to do, and in most circumstances it would be morally wrong,” she said. But me. Price thought that Heidi Cruz, because she is the wife of a public figure, should not accept that any of her written communication would remain private. “Unless it’s encrypted, you can not accept that anything is private,” she said.
Still: “How nice would it be to feel fully safe in our correspondence with people?” think me. Price. A rule of thumb to feel safe comes from the Times’ own Astead Herndon, who tweeted: ‘The key to any group conversation is the destruction of mutual. If you’re the only one who drops tea, you’re in danger. If one person is too quiet, they should go. ‘I recommend that you spend your time this weekend reviewing your conversations and erasing the parents who keep it close to the vest.