I'm not quite sure how I feel about it. Yes, that data was publicly available, but it 'feels' different that there is now an unalterable snapshot available to the public. No more comment deletion.
There's also the web archive and search engine indexing.
> This dataset will go nicely with the full Reddit Comment Corpus that I released a couple months ago. The link_id from each comment corresponds to the id key in each of the submission objects in this dataset.
Isn't that how hackernews is? not being able to delete comments
When the next snapshot is released, it will be possible to just perform a diff to discover all deletions and edits since.
So comment deletion was never going to save you.
This is actually what has been bothering me for a while now. In the past where search engines (well at least the big one) weren't that thorough, you didn't mind if something stayed on the Internet, since it wasn't easily accessible.
But it's a major difference if it's indexed/searchable or downloadable.
Teach kids about the internet. Many people are still under the assumption just deleting something would make it disappear for ever.
Maybe a lot of people from our generation are doomed to sharing too many things online, but we can at least save the next generation from themselves.
You make a mistake 10 years ago, may be a few close friends in your town know about you. Now you make a mistake, the whole world has access to that information.
Government regulations, bans are not going to do anything to stop the spread of information, we need to educate people to protect themselves from their own selves.
Not yet :)
Given their lax security and general cluelessness of the people in charge, I'm quite sure it will leak at some point, at least partially, perhaps to corporations, perhaps to the public, just as internal NSA docs have leaked. It's very hard to keep things like that airtight forever - all it takes is one slip up and all the info stored could be accessible at some point in the future. It's already indexed and searchable, just not by you.
The important point here is that looking at present day tech (as in your comment on search engine prowess) is not the way to look at it - one day all this information will be accessible to much more intelligent future algorithms, able to link it together in myriad ways and form an almost perfect picture of your life in retrospect. The data is there, and will be stored forever.
[1] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-06/14/snowden-memor...
https://theintercept.com/2015/09/25/gchq-radio-porn-spies-tr...