My mom’s messaging group has been a comfort to me, especially in this pandemic year. It is a place to let off steam, plan and strategize, and I definitely said a lot of things that I wouldn’t like to be made public.
I thought of my own potentially embarrassing messages on Thursday night. That’s when I saw the texts leaked anonymously from a chat group, which included Heidi Cruz, wife of Senator Ted Cruz. Through this leak, we discovered additional details about the Cruz family’s reckless trip to Cancún.
The Cruzes were photographed jumping on a plane to Mexico on Wednesday, while many of the senator’s constituents in Texas lacked heating, water and energy. Ms. Cruz invited her neighbors to accompany her to escape the “ICE” time and discussed the fees at the Ritz-Carlton in Cancún. It was a public relations disaster for Senator Cruz.
Whatever their stance on Cruz’s policy, chats entered the Internet discourse in great style and caused fear in those who like to mess up the texts. “Are we all in our group conversations now, looking around, wondering who might be ‘most likely to report’?” asked Allison P. Davis, a writer for New York Magazine.
As political reporter Ashley Parker said in The Washington Post: “Group text chains, after all, are among the most intimate and sacred forms of communication, and if you can’t trust your ‘friends’ to not leak them, so who can you trust? “
I decided to ask two experts about their views on this very modern disaster. Was the leak from the chats ethical? Do you have a reasonable assumption of privacy when you are texting moms in your neighborhood or should you assume that the world will know when you enter it?
Kwame Anthony Appiah, an internal ethics expert at The New York Times Magazine and professor of philosophy and law at New York University, said the situation “strikes me as a substantial breach of confidentiality rules.” Although Ted Cruz is a public figure, he hasn’t done anything terrible enough to justify violating such rules, said Appiah. We already knew that Senator Cruz had made the trip to Cancún the day before the texts were leaked and that his poodle, Snowflake, had stayed home in the cold.
The public gain from the additional information – which made it possible for people to know that Cruz was not being honest in making it appear that his trip should only last one day – did not make it worth breaking the group’s secrecy, Appiah said. . “It is unwise to wander into a luxury hotel,” during a crisis in your state when you are an elected official, “but it is not like killing someone,” he said.
Catherine Price, founder of Screen / Life Balance and author of “How to Break Up with Your Phone”, had a different opinion. “Unquestionably, it is not a cool thing to do and, in most circumstances, it would be morally wrong,” she said. But Mrs. Price felt that, as the wife of a public figure, Heidi Cruz should not have assumed that none of her written communications would remain private. “Unless it’s encrypted, you can’t assume that anything is private,” she said.
Still, “How good would it feel to be totally secure in our correspondence with people?” reflected Mrs. Price. A rule for feeling safe comes from Astead Herndon of the Times, who tweeted: “The key to any group chat is guaranteed mutual destruction. If you are the only one who is drinking tea, you are at risk. If a person is a little quiet, he has to go. ”I recommend that you spend your time this weekend reviewing your chats, selecting the parents who are keeping this close to the vest.