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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Not sure wha GP is referring to exactly. But at least in theory, it’s possible for Google to access the images, since they’re stored on Google servers. In practice this is very unlikely.
If you save the snaps to your camera roll, then any app with photos permissions has access to them (along with any metadata). But that’s obvious.
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.
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.