At this point, I'm not really comfortable with what we're preserving.
Our history is an inseparable part of who we are, and it should not be forgotten.
Things like HP Lovecraft renouncing racism is only preserved because he wrote so many damn letters. It doesn't make the racist stuff he wrote less racist, but it allows a really clear view on how worldviews could change at the time. Perhaps the things we are storing will have historic or philosophical value.
I miss real privacy though.
That being said, there's a lot of valuable information on the internet that is absolutely worth preserving. Scrape off the layer of social media and the internet is still a place of learning and problem solving. I do my own repairs on my car and the amount of times I've found a well written photo essay on a particular fix in a random honda forum, only to find the linked pictures broken, is astounding and a shame to say the least.
Kind of like saying “People who go to prison just shouldn’t commit crimes.” I don’t believe in making a case equivalence here.
Being publicly prosecuted has just as much to do with “who” you are as “what” you did. I’m personally not fine with this distinction.
One segment from the final episode featured on HN a few weeks ago. It references the burning of witches, in Scotland, from earlier in the same episode. Burke's point was that a set of beliefs which had once carried legal force no longer does. That route can run in reverse, and it's quite possible for beliefs, or actions, previously legally sanctioned (or at least not criminalised) to become otherwise. Prohibitions against ex post facto laws limit this in many jurisdictions, but changes in social mores are less forgiving. I've lived long enough to see some remarkable changes along several such lines, and have witnessed social and political upheavals elsewhere that are even more pronounced.
There's the question of whether or not it's the fact of a durable record, or the abuse of power through that record, that is the real root of the problem. As Aesop noted, any excuse will do for a tyrant. But the persistent record does seem to pose certain problems. Particularly against a shifting set of judgements.