You are correct. I was writing sloppily, and I should have referenced cryptographically secure content hashes. (And ideally published in a public, append-only fashion.) The key difference being whether you are validating the content, or the specific instance of the retrieval of the content by one other party. As far as the top of this thread is concerned, I'm advocating only (2) and never (1) for the "validating archives" purpose.
Consider a spectrum between "secure but trivial to repudiate" and "secure but nigh-impossible to repudiate with OTR and TLS-N on each end. Most secure messages are passed in situations somewhere in the murky middle. A privacy purist might argue that OTR-like behavior should be the default full-stop.
The question of "harming privacy" in any situation is more like spacecraft engineering than software engineering. We really do need to care about the very low probability events, because the cost of failure can be catastrophic to the individuals involved. Just pragmatically speaking, 1-1 communication in the context of TLS frequently means individual humans interacting with individual business/legal entities. Sure, the intent of anyone publishing a post on reddit is one-to-many communication.
But privacy in reading such a thing is a relatively new problem. It used to be a 1-1 relationship between you and the kid selling newspapers on the corner of town square. Even in the age of television, it was still a reasonable expectation that CBS didn't know and couldn't prove you were watching Walter Kronkite.
Consider a spectrum between "secure but trivial to repudiate" and "secure but nigh-impossible to repudiate with OTR and TLS-N on each end. Most secure messages are passed in situations somewhere in the murky middle. A privacy purist might argue that OTR-like behavior should be the default full-stop.
The question of "harming privacy" in any situation is more like spacecraft engineering than software engineering. We really do need to care about the very low probability events, because the cost of failure can be catastrophic to the individuals involved. Just pragmatically speaking, 1-1 communication in the context of TLS frequently means individual humans interacting with individual business/legal entities. Sure, the intent of anyone publishing a post on reddit is one-to-many communication.
But privacy in reading such a thing is a relatively new problem. It used to be a 1-1 relationship between you and the kid selling newspapers on the corner of town square. Even in the age of television, it was still a reasonable expectation that CBS didn't know and couldn't prove you were watching Walter Kronkite.