Last Friday morning I published Proof of human, which welcomed two "steps in the right direction" from W Social, Europe's verified-humans-only social network: a constitution that made the right noises, and a migration tool that finally lets its users leave if they wanted to. Credible exit at last!
A few hours later a German podcast, Haken dran, broke the news that (since an unscheduled server outage in September) W had been publishing data from its users' identity verifications on the open web - names, dates of birth, a few hundred email addresses and in at least one case a 15-year-old's identity.
The data protection questions are serious, and others have covered them exhaustively: see Elena Rossini's Public by Design in English, Pallenberg's Verifiziert heisst veröffentlicht in German.
Paranoia on display
But what fascinates me is how W, their users and the rest of the Atmosphere reacted.
When some volunteers built a simple data lookup tool (Have you been Wned?) so people could check what W had published about them, W's official account reacted as follows:
As we have communicated. We did the update on Septemebr 17th. Now a question back to you @wdonthavetime.selfhosted.social Who have funded you and what is your connection to other PDS operators? What is your motive to create a site framing public information as a "data-leak" what's your motive?
As Sascha Pallenberg put it: "a platform doxxes its users while its admin hides behind an anonymous handle and asks “Who are you?”". I got something similar from their CEO:
That "Who funds this flood of content?" reply triggered a long thread which makes the wider Atmosphere's views on W's paranoid reactions both clear and quite entertaining, not least because noone on the Atmosphere apart from them and Bluesky have any money at all. Of the entire thread, my single favourite post:
(The thread also sets out my current position, fwiw).
But what interests me most of all is W's users: the replies to W's statement were dominated by themes like "MAGA and Russians bots", "big government intelligence agencies", "bigger interests behind darkened screens", although a few pushed back ("What bots do You mean?"). However they didn't realise that W had limited replies to WSocial users - when it comes to hosting an open debate, WSocial's tolerance of Nazis does not extend to the rest of the Atmosphere.
Did W attract that kind of user, or did its own paranoia infect them?
Did W attract that kind of user, or did its own paranoia infect them? It's impossible to say, but the bot theories appeared to come after W's own "who funds you?" line, not before.
And while we're on the topic of bots and WSocial:
Call in the lawyers
Since the kerfuffle broke, W has published a four-page legal memo. Its measured, careful, legally-rich text doesn't mention shadowy funding organisations once, and tries to breeze past the fact that their own legal documents contradicted both each other and reality, as if being in beta absolves them of breaking EU data protection law.
"W Social is currently in public beta. Our Privacy Notice, Terms of Use and Frequently Asked Questions will be revised and aligned before our full launch"
I imagine everyone will go through it with a fine-toothed comb. More posts will be published, more accusations will fly, and the rift of distrust separating WSocial (and its users) from the rest of the Atmosphere will continue to deepen.
Bewilderment
That might actually be their plan, but I think not. As their posts make clear, there appears to be real bewilderment at WSocial's highest levels about the level of antagonism they've triggered from the rest of the Atmosphere.
That bewilderment looks to me like the result of a clash of cultures: they are a private company trying to build an old-school closed platform by piggybacking on top of an open-source technology developed by idealistic progressives which fled X for Bluesky. Unsurprisingly, that community knows what enclosing the commons looks like and doesn't like it.
The true irony here is that verification is supposed to build trust. Done badly it does the opposite, as W has convincingly shown.
Done well, however, it looks more like what Aster is exploring for scientists, or what Athumi and Eurosky will demo later this month with eIDAS - both are covered in Proof of human, and Robin just published a sneak peek of the latter.