I was thinking about this recently… By going to a federated system, one that essentially copies all of your content from one instance to another, when you delete a comment, does that comment get deleted on every instance? Is that even possible?
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All online systems suffer from this problem.
Bots are scraping websites daily, including places like archive.org, where they compile everything and save it for posterity. Half the time, your data is already saved by a third party, even if you delete it off a website.
Further, all databases have the option to flag something as “Deleted” and keep the original data while not showing the data on the main web page. Just because you “deleted” something online doesn’t fucking mean anything at all materially. It just means they are hiding it from end-users. The data is very likely still there. This is why people who are bulk-deleting their comments on Reddit are shocked to find those comments later restored… because they were never actually deleted to begin with. They were just flagged it the database as “deleted” and to not be shown to end-users.
Unless you are running your own server and your own service, you are at the mercy of strangers who are in full control over whatever data you share with them.
This has always been true, since the beginning of the internet.
This is why parents in the 90’s told kids to not post personal stuff online.
Because once it is sitting on a hard drive on a server owned by someone else, it is not legally any longer your data, it is now the data of the person who owns/operates that server and the hard drive.
Sorry for this message being kind of aggressive, I am very tired of everyone just figuring this out for the first time and thinking somehow it only applies to the Fediverse.
It applies to every single service you sign up for on the internet. You’re storing your data with someone else, and you don’t control the server software, database software, or hardware. That data is no longer yours. You are effectively hanging out on someone else’s property, and what you do on their property is being recorded.
This is not a Fediverse problem, this is an Internet problem.
EDIT: Forgot to add, it’s also the problem that the Fediverse is trying to help solve by allowing individuals to run their own instances and thus be in greater control of what happens to their own data.
Just to add some nuance;
Companies do delete data on individuals when they have no more economic value to them unless they’re required by regulation to retain that data. Yes it’s true the world is storing terabytes more of data per day, but my company holds on to customer records for 5 years, if they don’t do business with us in this 5 years we will physically delete that data everywhere. There’s many use cases like this where old data isn’t stored because it doesn’t make economic sense to. Maybe when there’s a next gen parquet file that can store a decades worth of records in the size of a few KB, but at a certain point data does rot.
I disagree. It is not an internet problem, it is a result of the fundamental properties of data that we couldn’t change if we wanted to.
Yes, this is essentially the Analog Loophole. If you show something to someone it is effectively impossible to stop them from taking a copy.
I used this loophole in the early 2000’s when I tricked my PC into thinking my VCR was a second monitor connected by S-video. I didn’t have enough storage space for all those episodes of Sealab 2021 and Aqua Teen Hunger Force I was pirating, so I recorded them to VHS to save costly data storage space.
I still have those tapes squirreled away somewhere.
This is astute and correct, it’s not necessarily even an internet problem as much of a “this is simply how data and transferring data works” problem.