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0 pointsrolleiflex6y ago0 comments

Yes, this is in fact a privacy feature - the data is gone 6 months after its last reference. In other words, we garbage collect for you so that you won’t end up dealing with a post you wrote when you were 14 10 years later, out of context. It’s sort of like the right to be forgotten.

That also makes it relatively unsuitable for long-term storage of stale information. Active communities will last, but archived ones with no new content won’t, and eventually be gone.

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bilbo0s6y ago· 2 in thread

Is there anything that stops an organization from just vacuuming up and archiving what it finds on these nodes?

I mean, can some company come along and build "archived searchable aether" as a service?

rolleiflexOP6y ago

No. This is about not collecting data by default, so what you mention is certainly possible. That said, if you stop posting, your profile would also be gone in six months, so a third party would no longer have an entity to correlate the history to.

Histories are useful only if they relate to an active entity and you have the option to kill that entity and move over to some other name - and that new name would be impossible to link from the old one.

bilbo0s6y ago

Well, they can archive the profile too then I'm assuming. So you can't really ever kill the fact that entity existed in such a scenario, but you can stop using it from its original space. It seems to me that companies like PDL and Oxy, (even the smaller players like RapLeaf potentially), could still put together your identity since they use the full body of your internet usage, and even non internet information about you.

I know it's hard to thwart people like Oxy, that are stacking all sides. Providing both VPN and proxy services. Then using those services to sell anonymized scraping as a service. Then collating online data obtained from scraping with offline data to create ridiculously detailed profiles about people. (Then leaking them all by the way. As though collecting them wasn't bad enough. [1]) But my ideal distributed social media would be architected to defeat something like Oxy. Because Oxy, PDL etc are already behemoths and the government has more comprehensive data on you than even Oxy.

I realize though that aether is probably just something to "keep the honest people out" so to speak. But my vote for a "nice to have" would be the ability to thwart some of the data mining and linking baddies that are out there.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606415

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