Then why make a site? That's like saying you don't want any photos of you to exist but you've been outside for years while people where making photos and now you're telling them to delete those.

So, what you’re saying is that a decision you make as, say, a 17 year old is one that you must stand by for the rest of your life?

And, yes, I get it, there’s more than the IA but it’s a point of principle for me. I’m not talking about erasing newspaper articles but rather the blog a kid posts when they are naive.

> So, what you’re saying is that a decision you make as, say, a 17 year old is one that you must stand by for the rest of your life?

That's basically the way it is anyway. If you go out in public (physically or virtually), you've lost some control over how long-reaching your actions might be. If you do something stupid in public, you can't prevent people from posting their videos/photos of it, or just talking about you. The internet is no different. While you can get your stuff removed from some places, you have no control over it generally speaking. Somebody might have screenshots for example.

In most parts of the world you are entitled to privacy even if you are outside, and you can demand photos/videos taken of you without your consent to be deleted.

Plus, just because I have a website, that doesn't make it's content open domain, for some business to copy all it's contents and publish them without my knowledge.

>you can demand photos/videos taken of you without your consent to be deleted. //

Can you name maybe five large countries where that's true? It's not true in USA, nor UK AFAIK. I understand it's not true in Germany either.

So, I only know contradictions, interested to hear. China and Russia, don't seem likely to have such laws - maybe they're common in South America, Africa?

Tempting as it is to reduce everything to a binary, that's not how things work.

>So, what you’re saying is that a decision you make as, say, a 17 year old is one that you must stand by for the rest of your life?

Yes, that's why at ryanmercer.com I leave incredibly embarrassing LiveJournal posts up from high school in 2001.

That's who I was, in 2001, not necessarily now. Those are things I willingly and freely shared on the internet. Do they make me cringe... yes, do I wish I'd never have posted them... yes, but I did so they are there to document who I was, to document what a random teen thought during that period, if someone or a potential employer wants to old 2001 Ryan against 2019 Ryan then I don't want to have anything to do with them.

I do believe that it would be norm in near future. You can store photo and video for some time (for legal purposes mostly) but after that you would need to either obtain consent of everyone on them, remove the photo or edit it (replace real people with computer generated ones). The tech for the latter is basically already here.

How would that even work? My Flickr account has pictures of probably 10s of thousands of people with various degrees of identifiability. If someone really wants their photo deleted and they ask me nicely, I might very well do so. But I'm not going to delete my photos from public-facing sites just because there are people in them.

They asked politely, saying please, and not advocating for any kind of imposition. How is that fundamentalism?

I personally totally agree with the petition. And at the same time, I also think people should have the right to remove their mistakes. It's just that when they have no strong reason to remove a site, I'd rather people leave it there so history can be preserved.

Polite or not the previous commenter made a sweeping appeal based on their view of what is right and seemingly without acknowledging that there are legitimate reasons not to want to be a part of internet history.

If a person’s reason is more akin to a whim, then persuade them of the value of being a part of the record you want to see.

I read maguay's comment as an attempt to persuade, not a fundamentalist call that no one should do this.

Then don't be part of the internet.

That's like saying "what if people don't want to be part of human history?" Like it or not, unless a individual is completely inconsequential, they're part of history, and that should be preserved for future historians to dig through.

We have the capability to preserve untold amounts of data for the future - far more than any other time in history - and some of us are more worried about ensuring that they don't have a place at that table. It's so sad, honestly.

If you do not want to be part of internet history, you should not be part of the internet present.