the Streisand effect

privacyops culture

When an attempt to hide or suppress information ends up drawing far more attention to it.

It is named for a 2003 lawsuit in which Barbra Streisand tried to remove an aerial photo of her home from an obscure coastal survey, which then went viral because of the suit. On the internet, trying to bury something is often the surest way to spread it.

In 2003 Barbra Streisand sued a photographer over an aerial image of her home, part of a coastal erosion survey. The photograph had been downloaded six times before the lawsuit, two of those by her own lawyers. The publicity generated by the suit brought hundreds of thousands of views, and Mike Masnick named the pattern.

The mechanism is simple and reliable. An attempt to suppress information signals that the information matters, motivates people to find and copy it, and converts a document nobody was looking at into a story. Once copies exist across many jurisdictions and archives, removal becomes impossible in practice however clear the legal right might be.

Its relevance to security is direct and frequently ignored. Legal threats against researchers who disclose vulnerabilities reliably produce more attention to the vulnerability, not less, and the same applies to takedown demands against leaked documents. The practical conclusion is unwelcome to lawyers and correct: once information is public, the decision is not whether it spreads but whether you participate in the conversation about it, and suppression as a strategy has a documented failure mode named after the person who demonstrated it.

Also known as: Streisand effect

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