[nerdponx]

Unfortunately you are not able to save or export your Buddy List.

Your data associated with AIM will be deleted after December 15, 2017.

Yes, you can manually save images and files to your computer until the morning of December 15, 2017.

Whatever you thought of AIM, it's stuff like this that makes you realize just how important software freedom is. Insane that there is just no way at all, without outright hacking the program (to the extent that hacking it is possible), to export your data, that you generated, and should by rights be yours to at the very least save (and not have to comb through potentially decades of chat history to export pictures and files one-by-one).

[kodt]

I, for one, am happy to see all my old AIM conversations deleted and lost forever.

[klez]

Ok, but that should be your choice, not AOL's.

[ct0]

It is your choice to save it locally. They are just saying that their copy will be deleted.

[shakna]

> Unfortunately you are not able to save or export your Buddy List.

[castis]

Did they ever say that information they store on their servers is solely owned by the user that generated said information?

[delinka]

In the US, copyright law says you own what you create. What AOL's TOS must do is provide you with terms under which you license your stuff to AOL. Nowhere in the law does it say they have to give you a way to export the creations that you put into their system.

[Karunamon]

Isn’t IM considered ephemeral anyways? Email is a different story...

[weoiurweoiu23]

It was the users choice to abide by the user agreement?

I don't get how any reasonable framework can exist to say such detailed efforts at curating my identity must be pushed upon others?

You want a lifelong log of your discourse? Write it in a medium you control.

This is some hyper-active nationalist zeitgeist? You are not owed a say in any and every facet of life that touches you incidentally. It's never been the case "on the ground" in America.

[jasonkostempski]

I would have preferred AOL not have the ability to even read it, let alone store it.

[cjsuk]

Yes. Thousands of ASL's are gone forever.

[nasredin]

Hold on, hold on, let me put on my robe and wizard hat!

[fragsworth]

I didn't even consider that. All those shitty things I said when I was a teenager...

[LeifCarrotson]

For me, it's not the shitty things I said. It's the things that I thought were eloquent and insightful and informative and good, that now cause me to cringe. Kind of like looking at some old code, wondering what illiterate chimpanzee produced that mess, and realizing it was you...

That said, the first messages from my wife to me still make me smile, and I'm sure that my responses that make me cringe would make her smile.

[drdeadringer]

I am again reminded that "youngsters these days" pretty much no longer have this option unless their online footprint is actively managed from Day One.

A part of me can't wait to see the President whose entire life can be cherry-picked from various servers and datacenters.

[nasredin]

>A part of me can't wait to see the President whose entire life can be cherry-picked from various servers and datacenters.

So we can add porn preferences (Hi Senator Cruz!) to list of non-issues people use when choosing the leader of the free world!

[drdeadringer]

Anthony Weiner is another example, albeit more "stupid" than "matter of course" given today's casual "life online" du jour.

[nasredin]

The documentary ("Wiener" IIRC) about his run for mayor is pretty good.

Like a train crash in slow motion - good.

[herbst]

> A part of me can't wait to see the President whose entire life can be cherry-picked from various servers and datacenters.

This is much more crazy the more you think about. Right now there are already thousands if not millions of kids who will never be able to get a higher up political position because of what they shared on social media.

[dredmorbius]

Pot has been legalised. At least in some jurisdictions.

Attitudes change. Sometimes profoundly. It can be quite disconcerting when it happens.

(Or when you realise you're living in the aftermath of some previous Great Shift.)

[zjaffee]

This isn't necessarily true, snapchat deletes all of the physical messages sent within 30 days.

[Xeoncross]

Snapchat is only one of several organizations who get a copy of the messages.

[zjaffee]

Sure, but the point is that they aren't retained, and in turn, leave young people in a position where they won't be blackmailed as adults for the shitty things they said as a teenager on platforms they thought were safe.

[spenczar5]

Didn't know that, who gets copies?

[vkou]

The US just elected a president with decades of his incredibly shitty life cherry-picked by his detractors. I'm not sure that him having a Facebook profile at the age of 16 would have changed anything.

[zeveb]

Before that we had a president photographed smoking a joint as a young man; before that we had a president convicted of DUI. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

[stevenj]

Same with Zuck.

[busterarm]

Holy shit, emphatically this, yes. Especially the conversations with exes.

[nasredin]

Roy Moore?

Sorry, couldn't resist ;)

[mcgrath_sh]

I actually took screenshots of my buddy list for just this reason. I will eventually put it into a text document. Seeing all my friends’ old screen names brought back so many memories. Was well worth the ~15 minutes it took me.

[erickj]

upload it to Google Drive for easy OCR to a doc

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/176692?co=GENIE.Plat...

[mynewtb]

Why let Google invade your (and your friend's) privacy just something easily done locally.

[benburleson]

Most people (including myself, an average HN reader) don't actually know how to do this locally.

[mynewtb]

You can search for 'OCR your-os' and will get a multitude of tools that work locally.

[khedoros1]

As an average HN reader, that's probably not a big problem. Surely, you're accustomed to researching and learning to use new pieces of software that do the things you'd like?

[aquadrop]

If you're on windows I found that MS OneNote has great built in OCR.

[drewmol]

Huh... good question. I guess I would just assume that if they were deleting the data, then that must mean the've already sold it to Google, with some type of exclusively contract that mandates the removal.

[jimmaswell]

This is ridiculous FUD, you're not compromising anybody's privacy by letting google drive do an OCR for you. The chance is extremely remote that there would somehow be a leak of the information to malicious parties or the like out of Google. Is this is all over the possibility of their advertising engine seeing keywords and giving you an ad based on it? Even if that's the case then that's not a privacy violation, no human ever can see how that's associated with a specific identity. Do you also avoid sending anything personal through gmail? Using google search at all? It's impractical tinfoil hat territory to act like there's any reason to be concerned about this OCR tool or any other instance of putting your files on Google. To my knowledge there has never been a hack of Google's data or any leak connecting any user's identity to PII.

[mikegerwitz]

It really doesn't matter.

For those who are concerned about the privacy and are mindful enough to care about the privacy of others, putting any information on anyone else's computer (like Google's servers) is a leak. You don't know what is being done with those data, intentionally or not. And that would be the case regardless of whether or not the software is free/libre---it's being sent across a network to a destination you do not control.

Of course, information is leaked all of the time. Depending on the software that you use, your (generally, not you specifically) address book on your phone might be available to numerous remote services, and that is directly parsable by third parties, and directly tied to you and your contacts. It's up to you to consider your threat model. mynewtb's threat model is different than yours.

[syntheticnature]

...and folks concerned about security were using AOL Instant Messenger?

[pathseeker]

>Even if that's the case then that's not a privacy violation, no human ever can see how that's associated with a specific identity

How can no human see the data that Google has? Google is not a magical place where machines cannot be compromised.

>To my knowledge there has never been a hack of Google's data or any leak connecting any user's identity to PII.

The Snowden leaks say otherwise. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/30/nsa_smile...

>This is ridiculous FUD, you're not compromising anybody's privacy by letting google drive do an OCR for you.

So it depends on your threat model. If you care about rogue Google employees or other actors with 0-day exploits, then putting information into the hands of Google is a risk.

[jimmaswell]

OK, that's the NSA, you can assume they know everything already. And in this case, the article mentions Yahoo, which is where the information was in the first place.

[ouid]

If that algorithm is building a model of me, then yes, it's clearly an invasion of my privacy. Google itself is the entity that I do not want to have access to a model of me.

[jimmaswell]

I don't agree that an algorithm building a model of you based on information you've provided to the website is an invasion of privacy.

[orblivion]

> Unfortunately

This is quickly becoming my least favorite corporate buzzword.

[epicide]

"We realize this is bad as well and we are on your side. It's just that the cosmos (fortune) has cast this upon us all. Woe is us! ... Unfortunately, you'll need to buy our other product to do this."

Edit: a word.

[da_chicken]

I'm pretty sure you can do this with Pidgin, which is the only chat program I used from like 2004 to 2010 or so.

[syntheticnature]

Yes, I have my logs because I used Pidgin since before they offered chat history within AIM.

[dunham]

I'd rather AOL not keep permanent logs of everything. They would now be for sale to the highest bidder.

As for my own data, Adium kept logs that I zipped up before I stopped using it. (And I have logs from "gaim" that predate using OSX/Adium.) I don't think it did pictures / files back when I used it, but I'd hope Adium would keep local copies of that too.

[jbob2000]

I found an old hard drive the other day and booted it up out of curiosity. What I found were old MSN Messenger chat logs from when I was a teenager. I spent all night reading them. It was... magical. Lots of vivid memories returning, I cried and laughed.

It's a damn shame that an entire generation is growing up with their chat logs locked in the cloud.

[emerged]

I haven't used their official client in decades, didn't even know it still existed. Trillian keeps your buddylist (along with backups) in the user data folder on Windows.

[dangoldin]

Agreed but in this case I took a stab at downloading the buddy list and with a bit of tech know-how it's not terrible: http://dangoldin.com/2017/10/09/downloading-your-aim-buddy-l...

[bargl]

This is interesting. Did you pay for your conversations? I mean yeah you generated them but I don't expect to get conversations I've had via phone back and I'm paying for that service.

I think the idea of ownership is interesting here. I don't disagree that you should own it but then wouldn't you need to pay for it? Or did you pay for it by letting them sell your data to third party vendors? In that case, yeah you paid for it. What about Hacker News? Can you export your conversations here? Should you be able to? Meh, sorry mid-day musings.

[herf]

Identity is super hard to export and it always has been.

There are privacy issues: do you disclose email addresses to establish identity?

Imagine exporting a Facebook group, it is incredibly hard to do.

[herbst]

Interestingly enough this should be illegal when you do a "Personal Data Request" they should be forced by law to give it out.

[linkedlist007]

Your data associated with AIM will be deleted after December 15, 2017.

Is it my data? If it is, why are you deciding for me what happens to it?