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Show HN: Redact – Automated deletion for your content on social networks

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Re: Show HN: Redact – Automated deletion for your content on social networks

#31

Post by slg »

kodah wrote: post #27
slg wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 identif…

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.

Re: Show HN: Redact – Automated deletion for your content on social networks

#32

Post by beedrillzzzzz »

ds wrote: post #2

Hey HN- Im one of the team members at redact. Redact is a cross platform electron app which allows you to delete content programmatically from most of the big sites out there (we are adding more every day). Meaning, you could say something like "Delete all posts I made on instagram with less than 15 likes in 2019" or (very soon) "Delete all my tweets that are political" We have been working on this for a little over…

Do services like Facebook Messenger or Twitter allow you to totally delete/redact messages, or is it just hiding the data from the user's view on one side?

Re: Show HN: Redact – Automated deletion for your content on social networks

#33

Post by throwkeep »

aboringusername wrote: post #20

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 '…

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

Re: Show HN: Redact – Automated deletion for your content on social networks

#34

Post by kodah »

slg wrote: post #31
kodah wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 identif…

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?

Re: Show HN: Redact – Automated deletion for your content on social networks

#35

Post by slg »

kodah wrote: post #34
slg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

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.

Re: Show HN: Redact – Automated deletion for your content on social networks

#36

Post by _ktx2 »

slg wrote: post #35
kodah wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

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 fo…

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?

Re: Show HN: Redact – Automated deletion for your content on social networks

#37

Post by slg »

_ktx2 wrote: post #36
slg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

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…

>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.

Re: Show HN: Redact – Automated deletion for your content on social networks

#38

Post by vineyardmike »

aboringusername wrote: post #20

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 '…

> 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.

Re: Show HN: Redact – Automated deletion for your content on social networks

#39

Post by kodah »

slg wrote: post #37
_ktx2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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 av…

> 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.

Re: Show HN: Redact – Automated deletion for your content on social networks

#40

Post by slg »

kodah wrote: post #39
slg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 av…

> 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 perc…

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."
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