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Comment by aboringusername | Hacker News Reader

If there are any Redact devs here:

Please add a feature to 'edit' messages with random data rather than redact. This has the advantage of not only updating the 'live' database but also if it's backed up in the future they'll only have the garbage data and not what you actually said.

Being able to overwrite history (where possible) is extremely valuable that reddit/discord let you do.

Additionally, there should be a 'spoofer' mode, that randomly makes comments, uploads multi GB files full of random data and adds noise to further enhance privacy.

I take great joy in "abusing" text areas and file upload boxes on the internet - it makes it significantly harder to track a subject in any way when you are making 1000 comments a day, uploading 10,000 photos you found randomly online and are joining 50 different channels ;)

To be honest I should probably make a script to do that, especially on HN...

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Maybe I am alone on this, but it seems pretty unethical and selfish to "abuse" these systems and intentionally upload large amounts of garbage data in order to improve your own personal privacy. It is the equivalent of polluting. Feel free to overwrite and delete your comments to protect privacy, but users uploading "multi GB files full of random data" is putting a real burden on other people and is going to lead to a worse service for everyone.

Unethical, maybe. Though, how ethical should one be in war when the enemy is a tyrant?

The signals to rebellion start slow: you pester and annoy the enemy to let them know they have tread on the wrong turf. You try to inform them, then you try to concede points for shared ground. Once the enemy has decided that your advancements and ground meeting are to their advantage, and continue to gain ground is what we identify as skirmishes and battle starts. You ambush, you destroy logistical routes, you make it difficult for the enemy perceive that this ground is worthwhile.

At what point do you fire the cannons? At what point does the normally docile rest of society join you to arm your rebellious battlements?

I think you are witnessing the populous arming their cannons. You can object, but you can't object that the enemy is closer than ever.

This just seems hyperbolic. They aren't a tyrant because you can just leave their platform. You want to use their platform without any of the consequences that come with that usage.

You are walking into someone else's house, making demands, and breaking stuff when you don't get your way.

Every rebellion looks hyperbolic from the outside, I would say.

Reddit is indexed by an outside party, not Reddit itself. Twitter is the same way. The most infamous of Facebook's data exfiltration was Cambridge Analytica, which again is an outside indexer. The accurate comparison, imo, is "we all came to this land to communicate together, but you use the platforms features to stalk people."

Advertising is more of a concession of privacy, which I can tolerate if it's iterated on.

The option you lay in front of people is "leave". So, someone of my convictions must leave once a platform becomes so popular that it attracts professional stalkers? Why is that the only acceptable option to you?

Honestly this explanation makes it sound worse to me. Your objection doesn't appear to be with these social media companies. It seems to be with the very nature of public communication. You want the benefit of publicly communication without facing any repercussions for what you said in public. And in order to help ensure you don't face repercussions, you are polluting the shared public spaces for everyone else and forcing these social media companies to clean up after you.

Every public platform can be externally monitored and archived. If you don't accept that, don't participate in public platforms.

Not really. I've participated in public communication since I was a kid. IRC, public forums, etc...

Advertisers and platform monetization are definitely part of the problem, don't get me wrong. I just signalled that I'm willing to iterate on that problem. When my mother gets a call on her cellphone by a recruiter looking for me when we share zero relationships online it signals a pretty desperate issue in how data is being used, correlated, and exploited. The public side of these APIs is just an exacerbation of those issues, because they're the same APIs an advertiser uses.

You painting me as someone who is trying to avoid repercussions is interesting. Do you normally assume the worst about people when you debate them?

>You painting me as someone who is trying to avoid repercussions is interesting. Do you normally assume the worst about people when you debate them?

I think you are assuming a specific connotation on "repercussions". I'm not talking about "repercussions" in the coded "cancel culture" way. I am saying that you want the positives of speaking in public without the unwanted negatives. That is the literal definition of avoiding repercussions.

If your public speaking establishes you as some type of expert, people are naturally going to start reaching out to talk to you. That is the nature of public discourse. What that recruiter did is wildly unethical, but it is a natural repercussion of publicly showing traits of the person the recruiter is looking to hire. There are downsides to being a public citizen. You don't get a free pass to act unethically in order to avoid those downsides.

> I think you are assuming a specific connotation on "repercussions"

Use more careful wording then. In my eyes, you're here to deny that a problem exists (for average people, not experts) and you're advocating for me to not participate in communities which I was historically able to participate in without having my data exfiltrated or stored in perpetuity. I've argued in the past that limits to public data could perceivably exist, I think this is reasonable, but to a denialist nothing is reasonable.

The framing you propose is quite rosey, but then you immediately walk it back with how bad it is, but that it's a "natural" repercussion. So, while I want to do something about it before it becomes a bigger problem that can't be contained you're happy to sit back and say there's nothing to see here.

But hey, feel free to keep commenting on my ethics without questioning your own.

I don't know what to tell you. I feel pretty comfortable with my ethical stance here of "Don't abuse a public resource or intentionally create more work for other people purely for your own personal convenience."

I think I've made it pretty clear "personal convenience" is not the issue at stake here. I guess you're just arguing in bad faith at this point.

As you said previously...

>Do you normally assume the worst about people when you debate them?

I don't know what I said here that seemed to offended you. If you point out something that truly crossed a line, I can apologize. You weren't the one who my original comment was directed towards and in your very first comment you admitted yourself that this type of behavior was potentially unethical. I don't think I have said anything worse than that and I don't know what I did that you consider bad faith. The one example you gave of a negative result was a recruiter calling your mother. Stopping that falls under the category of "personal convenience". We all get unwanted calls from time to time. It is annoying, but it takes a couple minutes out of your day and you move on. No reason to take that as justification for flooding public sites with "multi GB files full of random data" which is where the conversation started.

Yeah, that's not "personal convenience". I would say this borders on safety. I don't think it's that difficult to imagine how this same dataset in the hands of a bad actor is to be abused.

In your case, my assumptions of you are based on how you continually downplay concerns to "not happening" or "that's no big deal". You also readily accused me of avoiding repercussions, then walking back and walking forward those claims in some kafka-esque dance.

"Arguing in bad faith" also doesn't mean you've offended me. It's just a realization that you have some other motivation at stake here. People don't just recategorize a safety and privacy issue as "personal convenience" while dancing around calling it a problem.

I guess we are just going to have to agree to disagree.

I don't consider spam phone calls as a safety threat and you do. I am not excusing the abuse of this data. I simply think these are some of the risks someone accepts by participating in this activity.

I don't know what I said that you consider denying your concerns as "not happening". Saying you should just accept those results or stop participating is not saying those results aren't happening.

I don't know why you are so tied to "repercussions" as been some type of problematic word. All it means is unintended and unwanted results. It wasn't a judgement of you. It was a literal descriptor.

My only motivation is that I am developer, I do data analysis, and I use public services. I empathize with the people who have to clean up after users abuse these services and I don't like when public services need to be downgraded because of such abuse.

I will take back that you're here in bad faith, I apologize. You just lack equivalent empathy for people who have had these APIs used on them, had their data sold, etc... as the empathy you have for developers cleaning up data from people trying to avoid having these APIs weaponized against them. Empathy is selective, and my empathy for the devs is much lower because that's what they get paid to do. I think that's a fair stance to have.

If data being 100% available is a natural consequence you're okay with, and I have to accept that then you will have to accept that people who don't agree with this growing practice but don't want to be excluded from society will introduce entropy to make those systems less efficient as a natural consequence. The efficiency and ease of access of which is what makes them weapons.

I take issue with "repercussions" because it comes off as a dog whistle for "people who believe in privacy have something to hide". I understand that's not 100% of what you meant, but it's awful close. Generally, I don't think it's okay for data to live on forever other than in highly significant events, even then it should likely be anonymized.

I do agree that we'll have to agree to disagree that not participating in the new public discourse is a viable approach.

How about you just host for your own content? Then you can delete or edit them as you wish.

Are they actually overwriting history though? Or are they just adding another record, and hiding the previous version(s)?

> Please add a feature to 'edit' messages with random data rather than redact. This has the advantage of not only updating the 'live' database but also if it's backed up in the future they'll only have the garbage data and not what you actually said.

This is a good point. Reddit is frequently uploaded to BigQuery [0]

0. https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?project=fh-bigquer...

> To be honest I should probably make a script to do that, especially on HN...

Please do not do this to HN. It'd make the service way less usable for everyone else.

Pretty sure that'd result in a ban pretty quickly, given HN's stance on comment deletion, throwaway accounts and community building.

Just a heads up, Reddit now rate limits edits. Many redact tools out there have not adapted yet unfortunately.

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/mg077m/not_even_...

Hm any competent ops team would have backups if they really cared to find your original data

Honestly I don't think you are being as clever as you think. It would take ten minutes to write a filter to remove these spam comments and files and focus on your real ones (and every data mining company is doing this already). You can't beat a computer by trying to act like a computer. They are much better at it than you.

Have you considered just..not using the service?

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