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Comment by Kurtz79 | Hacker News Reader

You joke about it, but it is kind of scary that some obscure tweet or facebook post one did in their teens might be used against them when running for (whatever) public office...

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We’re in a weird transition period where all this information is now available but we’re not used to it yet. The illusion that people had a clean past is still prevalent. I suspect that in another decade or two, we’ll finally internalize the fact that everybody does stupid crap and nobody will care about it anymore.

I'd like to think so, but when I look at the disparity between how society treats the mistakes of one class of people ("He was no angel, he stole a cigar"), and another class of people ("Standard freshman behaviour, and besides, what is 'consent' anyways?")...

My fear is that more transparency will simply widen the disparity in treatment, because there will be more ammunition to use against the weak, while the strong are protected from accountability no matter what is dug up from their past.

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Major edit: This is why I am an advocate for privacy, rather than radical transparency. I think a level playing field is a prerequisite for transparency.

Or people will realize that the internet is forever and will stop posting even slightly controversially things publicly, unless under a pseudonym. My generation may be the first and last to publicly post all of their stupid teenage thoughts on the internet for anyone to dig up later.

I feel like it's more likely that someone will just automate private intelligence gathering and sell it as "generating a reputation score for job/relationship/political candidates". Like the social credit system in China.

It's probably a lot like having a diary you wrote when you were a dumb kid in high school being picked apart by the media and senate as a measure of your ability to do a job as 50+ yr old.

Conversely, his supporters will use this as a measure of how "in touch" he is with "tech culture."

So, on the one hand the stupid stuff will be touted as him being just a dumb kid, but the non-stupid stuff will be touted as revolutionary and ahead of his time.

I mean just look at what happened to some professional athletes. They get tweets dug up from when they were like 14.

The fact that their agents aren't forcing them to delete everything from before they were adults or even making a brand new account is malpractice at this point IMO.

It's even worse it seems: last year showed us people will manufacture accusations out of thin air, leaving you to try to defend yourself using whatever is left of your diaries and planners from 40 years ago.

Someone, I guess here on HN quoted something along the lines of: "the more noble the goal is the less the truth matters" (I'd like to know the original quote but I didn't write it down and now I vannot find it.

One of my college roommates was considering running for office one day. He spent a lot of effort to keep his social media presence clean including avoiding group photos at parties. This was in 2004-2009, and at the time I thought that he was being overly paranoid. It turns out that he was right. Even if you painstakingly prune your social media history today there is always the chance that someone will be able to dig it up. The internet rarely forgets.

Its a double edge sword. Given a right narrative you can turn almost anything to your advantage. In the privacy less society, this an important skill to have.

It really concerns me that my generation will have a smaller pool of politicians to choose from because of precisely this factor.

Or people will get to a point where nobody cares that someone sent noodz, or said stupid things when they were younger, since pretty much everything everyone does or says is now online, maybe we'll all start to realize that we're all in the same boat, and we should stop sweating the insignificant things

Keep dreaming.

The people tasked with spying on people daily -- the people who should know better and be more tolerant -- simply believe everyone is a hypocrite or some kind of monster.

In practice, no secrets means everyone will hate each other, not be more tolerant. People can't live with knowing certain things, and if everyone's secrets are in the open, what actually happens is that people can't live each other. It's stupid, they're stupid, but that's how they act.

That's why I built https://github.com/Nick-Gottschlich/Social-Amnesia

Sure as hell ain't perfect but can potentially clean up some of what you have out there.

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