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Totally agree. The tech community has a massive arrogance problem where we tend towards opt-out vs opt-in for everything. Just because us tech-savvy folks understand the consequences of, say, posting something online, doesn’t mean the bulk of humanity who isn’t tech savvy also understands that and agrees with us.

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While we in the tech community are guilty of taking many things for granted as generally understood, I’m fairly certain that “consequences for past public statements” predates the bulk of our modern technology.

There isn’t any way we can make being copied opt-in, rather than opt-out. We can not copy things. But we can’t prevent other people from copying things. So, it is better to set the expectation that things will be copied, otherwise people will be mislead into thinking they can delete their content, and will post things they regret.

Plus, if everyone can delete their mistakes, we’ll live in a world where it looks like nobody makes mistakes, and so we’ll be less tolerant of mistakes.

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