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Comment by losteverything | Hacker News Reader

They need to establish a policy for 3 or 4 or 5 generations from now. Like the us government allowing old census data but not new.

As a genealogy fan with known roots spanning centuries, at some point there no longer is any connection or feeling to a ggggf or gggg aunt.

I absolutely CRAVE to learn what life was like for my family. Why did one uncle hunt and send birds eggs overseas? Or one gggggm rode horseback to come to aid revolutionary soldiers? What battle?

Facebook probably will just be an archive 120 years from now. But a extreme long term policy will assist future genealogists. Something like "after 80 years past the death, all fb related data is available." after 25 years its available to direct line descendants.

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> Facebook probably will just be an archive 120 years from now. But a extreme long term policy will assist future genealogists. Something like "after 80 years past the death, all fb related data is available." after 25 years its available to direct line descendants.

This sounds highly troubling to me. Imagine being persecuted in your life because some ggggm whom you never knew about was an extremist (racist and what not - let your imagination run wild on how despicable that person was during their time). Your craving to learn about your family decades or centuries ago must not become an overriding factor for the entire society to abide by. The "right to be forgotten" [1], though not perfect, has a lot of value for humans.

On Facebook specifically, it is a highly buggy platform. Even as of yesterday, I couldn't get search to find recent content that I knew was there. I had to resort to other (slower and cumbersome) ways of finding it. This has been a long standing problem (several years). Content discovery in Facebook is terrible, and hence assuming Facebook to be the custodian of one's life experiences is a very, very poor choice, in my observation. Facebook is not the platform for archival!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten

> This sounds highly troubling to me. Imagine being persecuted in your life because some ggggm whom you never knew about was an extremist (racist and what not - let your imagination run wild on how despicable that person was during their time). Your craving to learn about your family decades or centuries ago must not become an overriding factor for the entire society to abide by. The "right to be forgotten" [1], though not perfect, has a lot of value for humans.

That's a really great point. I wonder though - if the archive is this thorough and the attitude for which the relative is now being persecuted was widespread at the time, won't the archive be able to prove the counterpoint that the hypothetical ggggm was similar to most other people?

Shouldn't we instead strive for the "right" not to be judged by the actions of our ancestors?

I'm sure nobody actively condones persecution of people in revenge for what their ancestors did. But if we sweep anything n generations back under the carpet, aren't we implying that anything less than n generations back is fair game for vendettas?

I fear this may be a fundamental part of human nature - some folks simply cannot let go of the past - no matter how distant it was.

While human nature can excuse some lasting response to lived experience, I think there's a wider gap to bridge before ethics allows us to generalize and map past crimes to present perpetrators.

<Imagine being persecuted in your life pbecause some ggggm whom you never knew

Well.. Everyone has someone who can be judged by current times.

I have no pictures to speak of; no writings; no videos; no future messages;

Just because its very time consuming to establish the past doesn't mean its not my family's past. Im not judged now because of it.

Really, can you name a better way to totally bore someone other than talking (for more than 4 munites) about one's family??

This wont be an issue, IMO

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