The Hawk Origin Story (A Community Builder’s Privacy Paradox)
The Paradox Defined
The privacy paradox: is the delta that exists between our attitude towards protecting our personal privacy and reality of the way we behave online.
Had I known about this incongruity when I first encountered the internet, I might have done things differently.
My story started innocently enough back in the mid ‘90s — I was a budding software developer who had just discovered the magic of forums for the first time and was hungry to learn.
Online community was a very loosely governed practice back then, and as a young female I was such a target for harassment and trolling that I quickly made the decision to use only my surname - Hawk. The androgyny felt safer and it gave me back my agency.
Like most young people though, I wasn’t thinking about the future.
The act of balancing personal safety with personal growth is a difficult one, especially in an environment that changes so quickly. Our behaviours evolve alongside technological advancements, creating new social and cultural norms.
For community builders, the tension is amplified because they're responsible for a large body of people with differing motivations and varying levels of risk aversion, and it’s their job to encourage those people to engage openly with each other in a space that feels safe for them.
And therein lies the community builder’s privacy paradox: what does that space look like?
Communities thrive on openness, but members need privacy protection to feel safe enough to engage - and what that protection looks like is different for everyone. Too much transparency exposes risk, so privacy encourages participation; but too much privacy hinders engagement and impedes discoverability.
The key to enabling transparent discussion is collective trust - and this matters more now than ever. Rapidly advancing technologies are amplifying privacy challenges and accelerating timelines. We’re living in a world where data breaches, surveillance capitalism and a constantly moving regulatory landscape are the norm.
All of which makes the job of building community trust both incredibly difficult, and too important to ignore.
If we get it wrong we run the very real risk of seeing these rich sources of shared knowledge and recorded history degrade into low value wastelands, or worse still - fragment into polarised echo chambers.
Is that a future any of us want?
What Does Openness Enable?
Open communities offer broad reach and public accessibility, while closed communities emphasize trust and control.
Both have pros and cons; it’s the job of community builders to assess the individual and collective needs of their members and make appropriate decisions that balance public data access with individual privacy rights and collective psychological safety.
The more open we are, the deeper our connection, our sense of belonging and trust.
Trust is the bedrock - communities rely on members sharing their knowledge and experience, and that comes with some level of personal exposure. Sufficient privacy protection supports psychological safety and allows people the freedom to be more transparent and vulnerable.
Openness makes knowledge sharing more effective because (as well as having more reach than private ones) public topics hold more value. Instead of just providing answers, public discussions enable everyone to learn from the process, supporting critical thinking and innovation. Open conversations become searchable community wisdom, culminating in a collective knowledge repository, which becomes both historical documentation and legacy.
Public discourse encourages better behavior and more thoughtful contributions by holding people accountable. It increases discoverability, allowing new members to find relevant discussions and bring in new expertise to the community.
This opens the door to the network effect - attracting more valuable participants, supporting diversity and getting ahead of question fatigue.
The Real Privacy Risks
There are very real consequences to getting the balance wrong and we should be wary.
Data breaches are anxiety inducing in themselves, but the fallout is much wider reaching (and longer lasting). The potential threat to personal safety is immense, and the professional and reputational damage caused by leaked data ranges from embarrassing to catastrophic.
We all have a lasting digital footprint - more memorably stated as “the internet is forever.” This is the part I missed when I decided to use my real name to pseudonymise - that I couldn’t drop at any point in the future if I wanted the freedom to disassociate from my own digital footprint.
Permanent records mean that today’s opinion becomes tomorrow’s liability.
Whenever I made a questionable choice as a child, my mother would ask whether I’d be ok putting it on the front page of the newspaper. Good advice, and with a bit of a modern twist, it still rings true.
We’ve seen enough disasters in the media to understand how damaging recycled historical content can be when taken out of context. Your past can come back to haunt you.
Authentic participation is a challenge without total transparency, and that’s threatened when we have to worry about the ongoing low grade threat of identity exposure. We are learning as a society that our online presence is how we are perceived, not just socially but in all aspects of our lives. We form a digital reputation whether we like it or not, so we should want to have agency over how we present.
Thanks to my mother’s sound advice, my reputation was clean enough that my pseudonym became my professional identity. It was an organic and largely seamless transition, but it had an unintended consequence. It introduced the concept of “context collapse” - where distinct audiences and social contexts merge online, blurring professional and personal boundaries. People I was meeting in a professional setting already knew much more of my personal history than I would usually have been comfortable sharing with a stranger. When context collapse is flipped, professional discussions can become personal vulnerabilities which may hinder people from sharing important details when asking for professional advice in an open forum.
Where Traditional Approaches Fall Short
All this complexity makes it tempting to take an all-or-nothing stance; but choosing a completely open or completely private approach misses the point. Communities are unique and their nuances define them. As such, they need carefully considered and similarly nuanced privacy protection frameworks.
Think about the different privacy requirements needed by a community focused around supporting youth mental health compared to one for older DIYers repairing lawn mowers. The former has a highly vulnerable population of minors and the latter, a population that statistically might be heavier in phishing targets. One-size-fits-all doesn’t work and can in fact be detrimental if it introduces the kind of privacy theater caused by a lot of official looking policies that don’t actually protect users from real risks. The resulting false sense of security puts individuals at greater risk because they're less likely to be personally vigilant.
The flow on effect: an increase in moderation burden. Users without a proper understanding of how to protect themselves are now operating in an unsafe environment, so privacy protection becomes a community management overhead.
Platform dependency should be a concern for community managers. It’s becoming increasingly more important to have autonomy and control over your platform, your policies and your data. Relying on big tech privacy policies that you have no control over can make it difficult to adapt to the specific needs of your community, which is a vital part of building trust. There is also a greatly increased risk of a data breach when hosting a community on a large, centralized platform because they have a single point of failure.
Community builders should look for an extensible platform that innovates quickly enough to keep up with the emerging technologies. Brand communities wanting their content to be accurately represented in GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) results will need a subset of their data crawled so be prepared for the future by embedding privacy and security practices into everything you do.
Help people understand that it's not a box ticking exercise.
It’s a guiding principle.
Practical Privacy-Preserving Strategies
The basis of any practical privacy strategy is some form of tiered access system. In most cases a combination of completely public discussions, secured member-only areas, and segregated invite-only spaces is sufficient. A more complex system encompassing gated visibility and access to functionality based on a trust level system is optimal.
If possible, allow for pseudonymous participation as a compromise over anonymisation. This makes room for valuable contributions without full identity exposure and protects the future integrity of your data, which is threatened when people decide to anonymise or delete their account.
Be intentional about content lifecycle management policies and rigorous about compliance. Documenting when and how sensitive discussions are moderated, archived or removed will help support external compliance efforts and adds another level of transparency.
Build trust by giving people agency. Provide optionality so they can make selective disclosure choices and control their own level of visibility or exposure. Offering data export and portability functionality gives members ownership over their contributions, increasing their psychological investment in the community as well as meeting basic compliance standards.
Communities that are highly risk averse generally prefer to keep their data on premise. And self-hosting has its advantages if you have the technical resources needed to manage it securely. Having full control of your data means you have much more platform independence, which anyone that has tried to migrate off Facebook Groups or Khoros knows is a valuable advantage.
While it might mean a less personalised experience, using identity verification that doesn’t become surveillance can build trust and help your members help themselves. The best platforms give individuals agency by providing flexible and appropriate content controls granular enough to allow member-level access control over specific content.
The right approach: take a macro view of security and adopt a data minimisation strategy, collecting only what’s necessary for the community to function without undue friction.
Building Trust Through Design
We encourage Discourse communities to adopt a privacy by default policy, making protection the easy choice, not the hard one.
Provide clarity through easily discoverable, transparent policies and privacy notices that educate and empower your members, giving meaningful options about their data and visibility.
Have clear definitions around data classification, helping people understand what’s appropriate for public spaces, what’s not, and why. Visually demarcate (as clearly as you can) the different spaces and default new content to private if the nature of the community is sensitive.
Crowdsourcing your community governance, involving members in privacy decision-making and policy-setting will build trust and investment. Those most engaged are more likely to become power-users and ultimately the basis of a scalable moderation solution.
The Moderation Connection
Thoughtful, intentionally designed moderation solutions can be critical, especially if the community in question is a high risk vector due to the nature of its content or the vulnerability of its members. Rigor and consistency are key. At minimum there should be clear signposting and consistent moderation practices that educate as much as they police.
Members may need help and guidance to understand the complexity of rigid legislatory rules like the “right to be forgotten” and the associated decisions that balance individual privacy with community memory. The implications for data integrity and preservation can be dire.
Transparency reporting (such as required by some of the newer regulations like the OSA) gives an added level of confidence for members by being open about how privacy protections actually work. While these new regulations introduce a lot of additional work and process, they're mission critical; privacy and security compliance are the responsibility of all community operators. It is, in fact, the job.
Regulatory Compliance Without Soul-Crushing Bureaucracy
GDPR was an early indicator of the changing online compliance landscape.
Many communities took a hard line when it came to interpreting the law and implemented rigorous compliance strategies that had devastating effects on community engagement. Inflexible policies around account and content deletion led to compromised database integrity and missing context in discussions. Some of these choices came about from a lack of understanding of the reasoning behind the legislation - but that’s a solvable problem.
Having a good relationship with your platform or data hosting vendor is helpful when trying to understand the intricacies of their settings and controls and how they can be used in compliant ways. If that’s not an option, do your own due diligence, putting the appropriate agreements in place with vendors, and verifying that your tools and partners respect member privacy and provide compliance options
Documentation is another vital piece of the puzzle. Careful record keeping protects your members as well as your organisation. Keep excellent (detailed) records and have easy access to logs and other data so it can be located quickly on demand.
Think hard about reporting - both transparent and internal.
My take: I prefer to adopt an holistic approach to safeguarding member privacy by providing flexible options and supporting education, with targeted solutions for higher risk members or groups. If you prefer to take a regulation specific approach, consider the risk of people accessing the community from places you do not expect. You are still responsible for handling their data in compliance with the laws covering their jurisdiction — not yours.
When to Choose Protection Over Openness
Complying with privacy laws doesn't mean that you have to implement an inflexible set of rules.
Most of the current regulations dictate very few actual rules - they're based on risk assessment frameworks which are designed to encourage deep evaluation of the privacy needs of the audience in question. The outcome of those assessments provides the data on which to base decisions - including what content should be discoverable and what should be closed.
This approach is more inclusive of vulnerable populations, allowing for extra protections without marginalising the community more than necessary. It encourages intentional thinking about the value the community has to offer to the wider world, and how its content might shape wider cultural thinking.
Some topics should obviously be protected while others may only pose a risk to a small subset of people so creating choice is important.
It’s still up to the community builders to balance the risk of harm against engagement and motivation.
It’s about psychological as much as tangible safety — the safer people feel, the more comfortable they feel taking risks. Are the potential professional consequences of asking a stupid question in an open business forum worth it? Are the risks of legal liability worth asking a question about compliance in a tax forum?
It's a fine balance, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
The Future of Private-Public Communities
Emerging technologies are changing things up, with AI already playing a leading role in easing the current privacy-openness tensions. Moderation triaging modules that rapidly scan incoming data for risky content and changing patterns of behaviour are becoming increasingly fundamental tools in our safety arsenals.
It's my hope that regulatory trends sway towards a holistic approach to privacy, with governing bodies working more towards alignment.
Community practitioners are already feeling worn down by the burden of protection and afraid of the unknown complexities of new technologies. We need them to embrace AI because it holds the future of community. And the only way that happens is through education.
The starting point is resetting misconceptions within our communities and speaking with conviction about how privacy consciousness is changing community participation and what that means for humanity.
Once that reset occurs, the competitive advantage comes into play; as universal knowledge grows, privacy-conscious communities are well placed to attract higher quality contributions from well engaged members that have the freedom to speak without fear of repercussions — real or imagined.
We are in an era of rapid platform evolution, giving community builders more agency than ever. Choose a platform provider that is innovative and iterates rapidly. As well as supporting you in staying ahead of the compliance game in a manageable way, platforms that enable optionality not just around what data you share, but how you share it offer a critical advantage.
Having the ability to be selective about what data you share for training AI models gives communities agency to enrich data-sources in a way that won’t (can’t!) come from closed communities.
A Framework for Decision-Making
Where do you start?
If you’ve undertaken an OSA risk assessment you should already be well placed to answer that question — and anyone that hasn’t should do so as a thought exercise. It gives you an excellent framework for assessing the potential risks to your members and it offers broad mitigating strategies.
Once you have a plan in place, member communication is your next priority. The most important thing is to get ahead of fear without relying on fear. Empower people with education. Explain privacy choices in a pragmatic way and work towards changing attitudes towards AI technologies. Communicate (as often as you need to) the emerging area of “predictive privacy” and the role of AI tooling that can monitor for changing patterns of behaviour, anticipating future threats.
The human element can’t be lost; privacy is a deeply human right and concern, and the way it feels to users matters almost as much as the policies that enable it. It has to feel accessible, and it has to feel free.
Remember: this is not a once and done thing. It’s a practice, a way of seeing the world through your community’s eyes. Regularly reassessing the privacy-openness balance as the community evolves is a vital part of the process.
You’ll know you’ve succeeded when your members understand and trust that participation happens on their own terms.