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Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

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Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

#81

Post by elric »

A couple of years ago, I discovered that archive.org had archived an ancient (1998ish) personal web page of mine. Back when the internet was a smaller, safer and simpler place. It contained a bunch of personally identifiable information, including a phone number and an address.

It took me months to have it removed from their archive. They are extremely (deliberately?) slow to respond to emails. They ignore EU law (right to be forgotten, and in this case GDPR on account of the PII). The domain no longer exists, and my registrar doesn't keep records older than 10 years because of GDPR, so I couldn't use that as a way to prove the page was actually mine. In the end I had to send them a DMCA takedown notice, which only worked because the page footer had a "Copyright Elric $lastname" notice. After another goodly while they finally "removed" the page. I'm sure they didn't actually delete anything, but only flagged the page not to be public.

If you have archived content which you can't conclusively prove is yours, you're pretty much screwed. And it seems like you can no longer prevent them from scraping your content, as they no longer respects robots.txt. I suspect their crawlers aren't nice enough to tell your their actual identity either.

Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

#82

Post by harperlee »

fabatka wrote: post #69
harperlee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 10 people follow you, then you are talking with family, not broadcasting to a nation, in practice. The audience can change when years pass.

But even then you know your tweets can be read by anybody. If a platform is fundamentally public, I don't understand how can anyone use it as a form of private communication.

Well it's human nature, really. You are not constantly stepping back and rationally evaluating the present moment. If you have a small bunch of followers and you start a conversation with them, the topic can evolve towards more sensitive matters. Kind of like with normalization of deviance in privacy terms. You just focus on the content of the conversation. As soon as you are answering to anyone, your mind focuses on only that person who said something to you.

Criminals post Facebook photos with evidence of their crimes constantly, as another example.

Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

#83

Post by f38zf5vdt »

It seems the whole world will have to relearn why forgiveness was once a virtue the hard way. In the near term, it's causing a bifurcation of society into people who exist and had an opinion versus those who didn't, or those who didn't _yet_. In time it seems like the former is just getting larger and larger.

Imagine how the field of mathematics would have evolved if we simply cast aside those who had ever failed to solve a math problem correctly. It needs to be okay for people to make mistakes, otherwise we will never grow as a race.

Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

#84

Post by elric »

tw04 wrote: post #35
nanna wrote: post #2

Honestly, I wish tweets were treated like verbal exchanges more than written. Not everything that is said needs to be recorded for perpetuity. If a politician or someone powerful tweets, then sure it might be in someone's interest to record it. Good luck to them. But unless you're someone that people really care about - it should be fine to just delete your tweet for good. If that means something problematic was twee…

But they aren't and won't ever be, and people should stop treating them like they are. It's no different than going to your local public square full of 200 people holding camcorders, and making a bunch of stupid statements. Did we all do stupid stuff when we were younger: absolutely. Would I want the entire world to see what I did as a teenager and judge me for it? Absolutely not. Which is EXACTLY why I personally th…

So your answer to "young people doing dumb things" is banning young people from doing dumb things until they reach $arbitraryAge? That seems unlikely to happen.

There's a difference between 200 people in a square watching and filming you, and between an organization doing the same thing and then making it available to all of mankind for the rest of time.

Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

#85

Post by EvanAnderson »

1123581321 wrote: post #66
EvanAnderson wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking before I speak and having consideration for how my words might be interpreted in the future is "toxic"? Words you say to others have consequences. It makes sense to take that into consideration. That seems pragmatic and polite to me.

The trouble with that is that the old tweets from an immature brain are amplified beyond their original context, intentionally, so that they hurt a lot of people, and then a punishment is applied as if the author had just deliberately blasted the world with their remark yesterday. People are using the private conversation analogy because so many teens just meant to write to a few friends or use it as a sort of diary.…

Yours and so many other posts here seem like an argument for now allowing children to use these kinds of services.

It also sounds like parenting needs to take into account this new reality. To the extent that it applies in my household I know my wife and I are.

Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

#86

Post by EvanAnderson »

harperlee wrote: post #51
EvanAnderson wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How has Twitter ever been "practically private"? We're talking about tweets-- not direct messages.

If 10 people follow you, then you are talking with family, not broadcasting to a nation, in practice. The audience can change when years pass.

Misunderstanding the medium doesn't change what it is, practically speaking.

Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

#87

Post by paxys »

gentleman11 wrote: post #72

This is a bit tangential, but I wish we weren’t seeing links to tweets showing up as hn stories. It’s not a legitimate news source, and it bans people left and right for nothing because they have such serious botting and conspiracy theory problems

HN isn't just for discussing "legitimate news sources" (whatever that even means). People can post anything they want from any source.

Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

#88

Post by showerst »

themarkn wrote: post #46
offtop5 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said, I stopped using Reddit and Twitter because I realized a few things. First arguing with other angry people all day has never accomplished anything. Second no matter what you say, in 10 or 20 years it might be absurdly offensive and that can destroy your entire life. The dumbest thing you ever said at 19 is a part of your identity even when you're 42. But that only applies to the internet. If I said somethin…

It does seem like people ought to just think more about the permanence of what we put online and act accordingly. There is no way to guarantee ephemerality for anything you send to another person online. They can always record or whatever in some way. We have to act like this stuff is entered into the permanent record and be OK with that. There is nothing we can do to 100% prevent stuff being recorded somewhere. I ag…

I wonder if we aren't at a bit of a unique moment in that:

1. Norms around speech have changed quite a bit in a fairly short amount of time.

2. For the first time, we have a group of adults who were largely on the internet as young people.

I think kids today are being raised to be much more cognizant of what they post online, (and what they say in general) so we just had this window from like 96-2015 or so where people where encouraged to post just about anything casually to the internet, and yet south-park style offensive comments were still ok for many kids.

Obviously there's always going to be some edgy-kids saying stupid stuff, and I daresay _most_ young people will say something regrettable if you record them for long enough, but this might be a really large cohort.

Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

#89

Post by [deleted] »

f38zf5vdt wrote: post #83

It seems the whole world will have to relearn why forgiveness was once a virtue the hard way. In the near term, it's causing a bifurcation of society into people who exist and had an opinion versus those who didn't, or those who didn't _yet_. In time it seems like the former is just getting larger and larger. Imagine how the field of mathematics would have evolved if we simply cast aside those who had ever failed to…

[deleted]

Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

#90

Post by ivan_gammel »

gorkish wrote: post #25
bern4444 wrote: post #5

I wonder how this will jive with GDPR/CCPA right to be forgotten laws. If a person has the right to be forgotten, I can't imagine that this decision will be allowed to continue for so long. Does the person have to ask for their information to be deleted under these laws? If so, this might be an additional avenue or good next step for protection laws.

I really fail to see how these laws should or could realistically apply to information that is published publicly. It's reasonable to expect they have something to say about the expectations and rights that a user of a platform ought to be entitled to in their interaction with that platform. However it's rather another thing to follow that this permission should extend to anybody who legally can copy or retain that i…

>This is akin to saying that an author could reasonably "unpublish" an article or a book because they somehow retain the ability to control dissemination of every copy of thier work in perpetuity

No, it is not the same. An author of a published book has intention to share it with the public and understands how the system works: you would not expect from this person to make any assumptions about the right to recall all the copies. An author of a post in social media may not recognize the fact, that the actual audience is beyond what he or she expected and that he or she is not in control of the access to this publication. The intentions and expectations are very different, and it is not the fault of social media users that they did not understand how to protect their privacy when living the digital life.

The example with "public forum" is a good one here, because speaking in public offline (e.g. having a conversation with friends or addressing a crowd) does not imply that the exact words or other details will be remembered and recorded, on the contrary, without special effort taken by participants any conversation is not recorded by default. That said, even if they are formally in their right and logically it makes sense that whatever is posted with public visibility should be expected to be copied and backed up, those archives are still attacking the privacy and should be regulated by law. There's much more public interest in that than in preserving some tweets, because they may appear important for history. After all, we spent thousands of years without recorded evidence of what people talked about and we are doing just fine.

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