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Though I disagree, I think basically understand your argument regarding why people should have to respect the wishes of a party when dealing with information th

Though I disagree, I think basically understand your argument regarding why people should have to respect the wishes of a party when dealing with information that the party made public. What I cannot understand is how such a system could reasonably be enforced. Let's say John Doe posts his resume on a job board. If I print out his resume, but he later updates it, am I now somehow in the wrong for retaining the old copy? I am also a little puzzled by the notion that "persistence" is a new phenomenon. Of course there have been paper records and such for quite some time, but I'll put that aside for a moment. When I was younger, I was often cautioned to think carefully before acting, as a reputation decades in the making could be permanently ruined in just minutes. It seems to me that when it comes to mistakes and "bad" deeds, society's collective memory has always been rock solid. Rather the persistence, I think the new factor is that things are less regional than before. You can't just pick up and move to a new town, because they basically have the same Internet everywhere.

anandsuresh 9y ago
>What I cannot understand is how such a system could reasonably be enforced. That would be a 26 billion dollar question, and one I would very much love to solve one day! :) I believe that your example is fairly simplistic to capture the crux of the issue here. The metadata associated with posts often contain features that are quite revealing, but not necessarily the kind of data that the source would wish to be revealed. E.g. I have noticed multiple times that the number of cold emails I have received from recruiters is higher immediately after I update my LinkedIn profile, leading me to believe that the last-update timestamp is a feature that the LinkedIn search engine may be relying on to rank results. While my evidence is purely empirical, it isn't a stretch to imagine that it would be a reasonable thing to do, given that most users normally update their profiles when they are about to start searching for new opportunities. On the one hand, this is a an excellent product that allows recruiters to reach targets that exhibit behavior associated with active job-seekers, resulting in better connections. It results in a win-win situation where the recruiter gets a pretty good return on his/her investment, and the target receives the attention/information they were looking for with their update. False positives in this situation result in a few unsolicited emails/unwanted attention. On the flip side, this information can be repackaged to present a manager with a graph plotting the probability of an employee quitting. While this is a perfectly good product, no employee would every use a service that might reveal their future plans ahead of a time of their own choosing. Furthermore, false positives here can have a significant impact and LinkedIn may not remain in business for long if word of this product gets out.
joncrocks 9y ago
With regard to persistence, I don't think you can argue that the scale of what can now practically be stored hasn't changed significantly. Given that a larger amount of information can now be stored easily, the economics of what is stored is different, and one would expect this would lead to the storage of more information over time. If you can store in a single HD what would have previously taken a large room, for a tiny fraction of the cost, the bar for storing the information vs. discarding it is much much lower. I also think it's not only storage, but searching of large datasets that's another reason that information changing over time. Again, if finding information in a large blob of data is easier and as discussed above, is much cheaper, then this will also lead to people storing information for later retrieval. As you say, the fact that all this storage is not networked together means that this information is now easily retrievable from anywhere, only intensifying the impact.

anandsuresh 9y ago

>What I cannot understand is how such a system could reasonably be enforced. That would be a 26 billion dollar question, and one I would very much love to solve one day! :) I believe that your example is fairly simplistic to capture the crux of the issue here. The metadata associated with posts often contain features that are quite revealing, but not necessarily the kind of data that the source would wish to be revealed. E.g. I have noticed multiple times that the number of cold emails I have received from recruiters is higher immediately after I update my LinkedIn profile, leading me to believe that the last-update timestamp is a feature that the LinkedIn search engine may be relying on to rank results. While my evidence is purely empirical, it isn't a stretch to imagine that it would be a reasonable thing to do, given that most users normally update their profiles when they are about to start searching for new opportunities. On the one hand, this is a an excellent product that allows recruiters to reach targets that exhibit behavior associated with active job-seekers, resulting in better connections. It results in a win-win situation where the recruiter gets a pretty good return on his/her investment, and the target receives the attention/information they were looking for with their update. False positives in this situation result in a few unsolicited emails/unwanted attention. On the flip side, this information can be repackaged to present a manager with a graph plotting the probability of an employee quitting. While this is a perfectly good product, no employee would every use a service that might reveal their future plans ahead of a time of their own choosing. Furthermore, false positives here can have a significant impact and LinkedIn may not remain in business for long if word of this product gets out.

joncrocks 9y ago

With regard to persistence, I don't think you can argue that the scale of what can now practically be stored hasn't changed significantly. Given that a larger amount of information can now be stored easily, the economics of what is stored is different, and one would expect this would lead to the storage of more information over time. If you can store in a single HD what would have previously taken a large room, for a tiny fraction of the cost, the bar for storing the information vs. discarding it is much much lower. I also think it's not only storage, but searching of large datasets that's another reason that information changing over time. Again, if finding information in a large blob of data is easier and as discussed above, is much cheaper, then this will also lead to people storing information for later retrieval. As you say, the fact that all this storage is not networked together means that this information is now easily retrievable from anywhere, only intensifying the impact.