This fundamentalism is unhelpful.
What if people don’t want to be part of internet history? It’s hard enough to be anonymous, or even to move on from mistakes, as it is.
What if people don’t want to be part of internet history? It’s hard enough to be anonymous, or even to move on from mistakes, as it is.
And, yes, I get it, there’s more than the IA but it’s a point of principle for me. I’m not talking about erasing newspaper articles but rather the blog a kid posts when they are naive.
That's basically the way it is anyway. If you go out in public (physically or virtually), you've lost some control over how long-reaching your actions might be. If you do something stupid in public, you can't prevent people from posting their videos/photos of it, or just talking about you. The internet is no different. While you can get your stuff removed from some places, you have no control over it generally speaking. Somebody might have screenshots for example.
Plus, just because I have a website, that doesn't make it's content open domain, for some business to copy all it's contents and publish them without my knowledge.
Can you name maybe five large countries where that's true? It's not true in USA, nor UK AFAIK. I understand it's not true in Germany either.
So, I only know contradictions, interested to hear. China and Russia, don't seem likely to have such laws - maybe they're common in South America, Africa?
Yes, that's why at ryanmercer.com I leave incredibly embarrassing LiveJournal posts up from high school in 2001.
That's who I was, in 2001, not necessarily now. Those are things I willingly and freely shared on the internet. Do they make me cringe... yes, do I wish I'd never have posted them... yes, but I did so they are there to document who I was, to document what a random teen thought during that period, if someone or a potential employer wants to old 2001 Ryan against 2019 Ryan then I don't want to have anything to do with them.
I personally totally agree with the petition. And at the same time, I also think people should have the right to remove their mistakes. It's just that when they have no strong reason to remove a site, I'd rather people leave it there so history can be preserved.
If a person’s reason is more akin to a whim, then persuade them of the value of being a part of the record you want to see.
That's like saying "what if people don't want to be part of human history?" Like it or not, unless a individual is completely inconsequential, they're part of history, and that should be preserved for future historians to dig through.
We have the capability to preserve untold amounts of data for the future - far more than any other time in history - and some of us are more worried about ensuring that they don't have a place at that table. It's so sad, honestly.