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> Nothing will stop stalkers from crawling stories with archive.is or even just taking screenshots. That assumes many things, the first being that someone thin

> Nothing will stop stalkers from crawling stories with archive.is or even just taking screenshots. That assumes many things, the first being that someone thinks you're important enough to archive, and that you were important enough to archive long ago. This is exceedingly rare for that middle ground you're discussing. You're right in that anything CAN be saved if its online and someone is motivated enough, but the added resistance ephemerality adds protects most people. You're talking a very narrow use case, and in that case it should be obvious your internet world is public realm. All of these points you're making rely on extreme stalking already happening. Not only stalking, but archiving of that stalking. For the vast majority of people and the vast majority of their posts, ephemeral content actually does disappear. Especially on mobile platforms that aren't really archived like the web is. Ephemerality doesn't save you from crossing lines (plenty of teens have gotten in trouble over Snapchat messages in various forms), but the generally mundane harmless stuff goes away and can never be later used to misconstrue or define who you are.

cirno 7y ago
> That assumes many things, the first being that someone thinks you're important enough to archive, and that you were important enough to archive long ago. This is exceedingly rare for that middle ground you're discussing. What is to stop someone from writing a crawler that goes around and captures Twitter stories for every user into a permanent archive that they make available online in a few years or sell to stalkers? That would be an extremely valuable pool of content. Just think of how much money you could make if you had 2020 dirt on a major political candidate in 2040. Maybe you know their secret fetish, their racist tirade, their thoughts on a controverisal subject, something the media would devour. > All of these points you're making rely on extreme stalking already happening. Not only stalking, but archiving of that stalking. It's a lot more common than you think, and nowadays they have Cloudflare to protect them so they're incredibly resilient. I was blinded to it as well. The problem with this line of thinking is that you're only an uninteresting target until suddenly you're not. It just takes one crazy person coming across you to radically change your life. That new app or service you developed may take off overnight before you know it. Or it may happen so slowly that you don't realize that the rules have changed for you and you need to start being much more discreet. The way these sites work is they build up dossiers before they go public with them. You'll think you are not being targeted for months, and then all of a sudden you get it all dumped on the web at once. These kinds of ephemerality promises are dangerous, even if you are lucky enough to never be targeted.

cirno 7y ago

> That assumes many things, the first being that someone thinks you're important enough to archive, and that you were important enough to archive long ago. This is exceedingly rare for that middle ground you're discussing. What is to stop someone from writing a crawler that goes around and captures Twitter stories for every user into a permanent archive that they make available online in a few years or sell to stalkers? That would be an extremely valuable pool of content. Just think of how much money you could make if you had 2020 dirt on a major political candidate in 2040. Maybe you know their secret fetish, their racist tirade, their thoughts on a controverisal subject, something the media would devour. > All of these points you're making rely on extreme stalking already happening. Not only stalking, but archiving of that stalking. It's a lot more common than you think, and nowadays they have Cloudflare to protect them so they're incredibly resilient. I was blinded to it as well. The problem with this line of thinking is that you're only an uninteresting target until suddenly you're not. It just takes one crazy person coming across you to radically change your life. That new app or service you developed may take off overnight before you know it. Or it may happen so slowly that you don't realize that the rules have changed for you and you need to start being much more discreet. The way these sites work is they build up dossiers before they go public with them. You'll think you are not being targeted for months, and then all of a sudden you get it all dumped on the web at once. These kinds of ephemerality promises are dangerous, even if you are lucky enough to never be targeted.