Screenshot Essays

A subtle but significant way that tech companies will continue to undermine user attempts to control their data, without stronger regulatory protections 

cc @eulerlagrange.eth @evin

building disco.xyz 🪩 chronically onchain at @boysclub

Working on building zkTLS infra/products. A ruthless empiricist and meme connoisseur.

http://opacity.network

Identity mixologist

Co-founder at @icebreaker

icbk.me/web3pm.fc

💯

In the EU you can *kind of* get a clean handoff via email whereas in CA/VA you cannot 

You’re right tho 

“Computer legible” != verifiable

Opacity

For my company /opacity we make the assumption cooperation from anyone but the user is a waste of time.

It’s def an engineering approach, but we have zkTLS with the collusion issue solved.

I really don’t think it’s worth trying to get companies to do stuff against their economic incentives

Even with zkTLS you are limited by what Twitter exposes in the app itself, which is only a data subset

One idea- could you zkTLS the data download itself, assuming it happens live from the app?

Yes you could, but if the file is large it would risk timing out the request before it’s done.

To fix that we’d have to sacrifice redaction support of the response. If it contains sensitive data the user may not want to share it with anyone.

You have to share the whole thing to be verifiable

I still don’t get the twitter follower concern.

It’s a lot cleaner if everyone exports who they follow. You need the new user to show up anyway for the influencer to get the follow.

You can get a lot more data this way like syncing DMs as well, and tweets

We live in a world with a poverty of verifiability. As an entrepreneur I have to deal with the constraints of the world as it is.

I really don’t think the twitter follower issue is a limiting factor. Nook specifically asked for the opposite.

I don’t see how letting them export their followers solves this problem.

Sure you have a list, but you need each follower to show up.

In what I’m proposing you can just tell influencers your followers will follow you in the UI, but have each user export who their following and auto link them up

Classic network effects business is where 1% of users generate 90%+ of the value

The hard part of the network.

On twitter, these are the influencers. Accounts w giant followings. If they can't port over their followers, they're 10x harder to move.

This is why it's a major factor