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Comment by btbuildem | Hacker News Reader

This is a reminder to curate and prune all your past social media contribution, because when this goes thru, you KNOW they will apply it retroactively. You'd loathe to lose your cushy job over a moment of lucid honesty back in 2011.

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I've been posting under my real name for over 20 years because this was always going to be the case. Using my real name is a constant reminder to not to post things I might later regret.

sigh, another typo on my permanent record.

For interpersonal discussion, it's a great way to keep yourself in check. For activism and journalism, that's exactly what "they" want from you. They'd rather you self censor, and live in fear of even just criticizing them by utilizing you own good reputation.

I think we should go one level higher and question when having opinions and being a multi-dimensional human became a professional risk. That has certainly not always been the case.

I haven’t had any social media accounts since I gave it up for Lent in 2018 and I’m increasingly starting to wonder if that’s a liability for me because there’s no social graph that whatever agency would otherwise use to, idk, confirm I’m not a threat or something. The lack of a digital footprint like that may look weird.

What do you consider social media? Because I'd definitely classify this site as one.

The big ones, like Facebook, instagram, TikTok, twitter, maybe Reddit. But I suppose you’re right, the line between “messaging board” and “social media” is a little challenging to define.

I can see it now: boards of directors will only hire CEOs from the amish population, it's the only way to avoid criticism.

It's already too late for that but you can at least, by deleting now, reduce the chances they see it.

Not your HN account though. They even stopped replying to my annual emails asking if it's "possible" yet. They originally help me change the name, and scrub any replies that mentioned the original name. That's not enough though, thanks to old copies of the site data that still have my original name, linked directly to the real HN post it appears on, showing up in search results.

If you're in Europe, you can sue them under GDPR? They won't obey - HN explicitly chooses to disobey European laws - but having an arrest warrant out might be inconvenient enough for them to do it anyway.

That would likely result for just adding the geofencing so that EU countries can’t access directly.

Seems an improvement, and wouldn't help with the arrest warrant because the law still says they have to delete old data.

Dang removing your posts only hurts the flow of conversation and has zero benefit for your privacy.

All HN threads are archived by the IA and there's data dumps of the whole thing under 50 GB iirc.

Going back and messing with comments will not help. The only way to prevent your posts from being associated with you is to never post or associate them in the first place.

Facebook keeps backups.

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