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Data should never be deleted. Ever.

Start by accepting that, and everything starts to make sense.




Child porn? Video of you in the bathroom that someone took from a hidden camera? Your stolen financial information?


Sure, of course.

But the problem is that if you can delete that stuff, someone else can delete stuff that you don't want to be deleted.


If you don't want something deleted, you can always keep a copy of it yourself.


Exactly. Which means you can't delete your bathroom video from any networked system. See the Streisand effect.


That is _literaly_ what we already have. If you delete (unpin) content, others are free to keep it (pinned).

The OP was suggesting a way to delete things from other peoples machines.


Yes, but only if you manage that before it's gone.


No. It's unreasonable to expect they could be deleted.


That’s just a dogmatic statement, you need to motivate it.


It's unreasonable to expect to be able to delete data that's been released publicly. Any attempt to delete arbitrary data will either fail or involve extreme authoritarian measures.

Once you accept that, you can focus on reducing the output of compromising information, rather than trying to erase it after the fact. Prevention over cure. This will inevitably lead to a society where people do more of what society wants, and less of what society doesn't. This is a good thing.

Also, I feel like we don't collect as much information as we should. Analytics is a lot less comprehensive than it should. Other than CCTVs, real-world analytics is basically non-existent. This greatly inhibits progress in AI/ML.


How does “should never be” follow from “difficult in practice”?




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