Is the group chat sacred?

My mother’s group of messages have long been a comfort to me, especially in this year of the pandemic. It’s a place to vent, plan, and strategize, and I certainly said a lot of things that I wouldn’t want the audience to blow up.

I thought about my own potentially embarrassing messages on Thursday night. It was then that I saw the anonymously leaked texts of a focus group, which included Heidi Cruz, wife of Senator Ted Cruz. Through this leak, we learned more details about the Cruz family’s misguided trip to Cancun.

The Cruzes were pictured jumping on a plane to Mexico on Wednesday, as many of the senator’s voters in Texas ran out of heat, water and electricity. Mrs. Cruz had invited her neighbors to come with her to escape the “FREEZING” weather and discussed the rates at the Ritz-Carlton in Cancun. It was a public relations disaster for Senator Cruz.

Whatever your stance on Cruz’s politics, cats have largely entered Internet discourse and sowed fear in the hearts of those of us who like to be messy in our texts. “Are we all in our group chats now, looking around, asking who might be ‘most likely to snitch’?” Allison P. Davis wondered, writer for New York Magazine.

As political reporter Ashley Parker put it in The Washington Post, “After all, group text chains are among the most intimate and sacred forms of communication, and so you can’t trust your ‘friends’ so as not to disclose them, so who can you trust?

I decided to ask two experts what they thought of this very modern debacle. Was the escape of cats ethical? Do you have a reasonable assumption of privacy when texting moms in your neighborhood, or should you assume the world will know when you walk in?

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a New York Times Magazine internal ethicist and New York University professor of philosophy and law, said the situation “strikes me as a pretty substantial breach of confidentiality standards.” Even though Ted Cruz is a public figure, he hasn’t done anything terrible enough to justify violating these standards, Mr. Appiah said. We already knew that Senator Cruz had made the trip to Cancún a day before the texts were leaked, and that his poodle, Snowflake, had been left at home in the cold.

The public gain from the additional information – which let people know that Mr Cruz was not being honest when he suggested his trip was only to be one day – was not worth breaking the secret of the group, Mr. Appiah said. . “It’s not wise to walk around a luxury hotel,” during a crisis in your state when you’re an elected official, “but it’s not like killing someone,” he said.

Catherine Price, the founder of Screen / Life Balance and author of “How to Break Up With Your Phone,” took a different approach. “It is certainly not the right thing to do, and in most cases it would be morally wrong,” she said. But Ms. Price believed that because she was the wife of a public figure, Heidi Cruz should not have assumed that any of her written communications would remain private. “Unless it’s encrypted, you can’t assume something is private,” she says.

Still, “Would it be nice to feel completely secure in our correspondence with people?” Mrs. Price thought to herself. A basic rule of thumb to feel safe comes from Astead Herndon of The Times, who tweeted: “The key to every group discussion is mutually assured destruction. If you’re the only one dropping tea, you’re at risk. If a person is a little too quiet, they have to go. I recommend that you spend your time this weekend reviewing your discussions, eliminating the parents who keep him close to the waistcoat.