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"As tech continues to improve, we will increasingly face a world where there are no secrets. I don't see this as preventable"

It's absolutely preventable, we just have to make the choice to do that.

Of course - there are 'some bits of data' that will get persisted here and there, but by enlarge, there's ways to do this:

1) Policy 2) Common ethics 3) Regulation 4) Architecture 5) Law

If it became 'policy' at most companies to address this issue, there are a number of things they could do.

If it there was awareness about this - and it was framed as a moral issue, large swaths of organizations might simply make do.

Identity/Software/Systems architecture may be able to enable this - i.e. being able to make online transactions without actually identifying oneself.

Responsible regulations and responsible law could urge companies to do this.

Obvious, it will never be fully thus - but there are a lot of things that we could do.

Starting with: any account you open, you should be able to close and have all relevant information erased, unless there is some special requirement otherwise.

This is law in some places and it's not entirely unreasonable.

If we collectively made the choice we could make the internet 'mostly' a private experience for people.

> ... any account you open, you should be able to close and have all relevant information erased, unless there is some special requirement otherwise.

> This is law in some places and it's not entirely unreasonable.

Its absolutely unreasonable (eg) for HN. And this is just one form of information processing.

I don't agree at all.

It's neither unreasonable nor entirely impractical from a mechanical perspective once it's thought through a little bit.

Because comments are made here effectively anonymously, I don't see the issue, but it's not at all unreasonable that comments could be removed given a mandate.

Giving every HN user power to delete all his comments will make HN unreadable. To understand a comment, access to all ancestor comments is needed.

I don't know, I often encounter [flagged] or whatever it is that happens to bad comments in the middle of a thread. It leaves me wondering what was actually said.

So it happens already, just for different reasons...

You can turn on [showdead] in your profile to see flagged comments.

Ah, I hadn't realised that!

There shouldn't be a need to delete one's comments to achieve a right to be forgotten, only to remove the identifier of the user who made them.

"Giving every HN user power to delete all his comments will make HN unreadable."

No, I think it would be so rare it would not make a difference.

For that 'small intrusion' on your HN experience, you get a hefty dose of privacy and security protection.

I would gladly agree if HN allowed people to 'delete all comments'.

Regardless, it's the way things are done in at least one country[1]. This only covers "personally identifiable information" though. Especially this paragraph is noteworthy:

>(8) Disagreement with processing pursuant to paragraph 6(c) must be expressed by the data subject in writing. The controller shall be obliged to notify each controller to whom he has transferred the name, surname and address of the data subject of the fact that the data subject has expressed disagreement with the processing.

What this means, is that if telemarketers call you, you just say that you require them to erase your data, and notify everyone they gave the data to erase it too. And you never hear from any telemarketers again. (At least in my experience, it says the disagreement has to be in writing, but they probably err on the side of caution.)

1 - https://www.uoou.cz/en/vismo/zobraz_dok.asp?id_ktg=1107

> It's absolutely preventable, we just have to make the choice to do that.

Hear, hear!

> but by enlarge

It's "by and large". https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/by%20and%20large

I think your examples are muddying up the discussion. Your 2 examples of:

>Identity/Software/Systems architecture may be able to enable this - i.e. being able to make online transactions without actually identifying oneself.

>Starting with: any account you open, you should be able to close and have all relevant information erased

... is not what OP (danaliv) you're replying to nor The Right To Be Forgotten[1] is conceptually about.

Your examples are about transactions getting erased. E.g. if a woman creates a Facebook account and posts some selfies, she should later be able to delete that social account and Facebook would erase the associated photos. It would not do further data mining on her profile.

RTBF is about erasing negative or embarrassing information. E.g. President George W Bush was arrested for drunk driving in 1976. RTBF would require Google, Bing, New York Times, Wayback Machine,etc to remove that information so people couldn't find it. Bush's arrest isn't a private transaction with a company -- it was a publicized incident that RTBF wants to erase. Would the (ideal) compliance of the law also require citizens who wrote personal emails such as "I won't be voting for Bush because of his drunk driving arrest" to delete that from their email archives? What about discussion forums (Usenet/reddit/HN/blogs/etc) where people talked about his arrest?

Erasing the Facebook account is a trivial implementation. In contrast, erasing Bush's arrest from the public mind is only solvable for centralized institutions such as the Google search index or The New York Times archives. All the decentralized nodes of information will not comply.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten

What scientific value does a drunk post on your exes facebook wall after a bad breakup exactly has?

What value does some hot mic slip of the tongue has?

Shift towards forgiveness isn't something you want to strive too it can create a very bad society where there are virtually no social norms or regards towards other human beings since everything has to be forgiven.

> What scientific value does a drunk post on your exes facebook wall after a bad breakup exactly has?

More than a historic record consisting only of favorable "truths" worded as carefully as an obituary, because everything else has been erased in a race to spotlessness.

Yes because when contemplating about a person's life what is important is what they wrote on the facebook of their former partner in their 20's....

You do understand that "whitewashing" obituaries isn't for the dead, it's for the living when a person dies most socially adjusted people rather remember the good not the bad. It's not to adjust history in anyone's favor it's to be able to grief in peace.

>> "My thought is that a cultural shift towards leniency and forgiveness is going to be by far an easier path than enforced privacy."

Things seem to be shifting the other way to me. The internet has given people the ability to enact vigilante justice easier than ever before.

I basically agree with you.

> I think that every single person in this thread can think of a dozen things they wouldn't want made public.

While privacy is definitely going away as we watch, secrecy is alive and well. For both private and secret data, an unrelated person would have difficulty uncovering the information, but privacy is a public good (people who have no inherent interest in hiding the data have access to it), whereas secrecy is a private good.

Those who truly value keeping information about themselves non-public will have to work to keep or make it secret.