[mabbo]

I think what everyone truly wants is the ability to be forgotten. "Like I was never there".

But Facebook has a strong monetary incentive to never forget anything, ever. They have an incentive to make it unclear just how much data they're keeping about their users. They have a strong incentive to be as opaque as possible. And even if they let users be forgotten, they've got a strong incentive to make that hard to do.

How can Facebook balance it's responsibility to shareholders to earn profits with their responsibility as ethical humans to allow people to be forgotten? I do presume that, as people, they want to be ethical (and I'm sure someone will say I'm naive for believing that).

And how can Facebook make it's decision on where they lie on that spectrum clear to their users, so people can make informed decisions about what they want to share and do on the platform?

The hardest decisions businesses have to make is when to give up profit by doing the right thing. And the most profitable companies are the ones run by sociopaths for whom this is not a difficult problem.