You are potentially conflating two different issues. > Think of the privilege you had when you were younger. You could do something stupid and nobody could whi

You are potentially conflating two different issues. > Think of the privilege you had when you were younger. You could do something stupid and nobody could whip out a high def camera to record it and make it part of your history forever. This is an excellent point, and I agree 100%. But it's not a priori obvious that we need to embrace internet rot to solve this problem. Perhaps we can work towards a future where privacy rights and digital literacy protect individuals from offense archaeology, and at the same time, work to preserve the knowledge, ideas, and sheer human weirdness that get posted every day (as long as the creators don't want it removed. My understanding is that the Internet Archive has explicitly stated that they are not interested in preserving stuff where there has been a takedown request.) One might argue that we have to make a choice. This is touched on in the article - redundancy presents a tradeoff between persistence benefits and security/privacy risks. But we should examine this tradeoff more closely and see if there isn't a healthy middle ground before we ask for one side wholesale.