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by kbenson 1437 days ago
It's impossible to control information once been created. The longer it's existed and the more locations you can see it make that spread exponentially more likely.

Wehether we make that spread of informationlegal or not does little to affect whether it happens.

There are two things that might help. First, don't share as much information. Once it's no longer limited to you or your close group of friends which hopefully won't share it along with your name, it's mostly out of your control. Second, put limits (laws) on what information companies are able to synthesize about you, and how long they can retain it. If there's less information created about you (or it's ephemeral, created and destroyed as needed), and if they need to clean out older data, there's less to be shared or stolen.

1 comments

“It’s hard to enforce the rule of law” is not a good reason to abandon it entirely. Data privacy laws make data privacy better even without being 100% infallible.

We should be both practicing good data hygiene and using legal tools to combat those who abuse data privacy.

> “It’s hard to enforce the rule of law” is not a good reason to abandon it entirely.

I didn't?

> We should be both practicing good data hygiene and using legal tools to combat those who abuse data privacy.

That's what I said. The first thing is data hygiene, the second is legal requirements. The difference I think is that the legal requirements should be on the actual creation and retention of the data, not just who owns it, who it can be shared with, etc.

As soon as PII information over a certain age is radioactive and linked to a fine per person, all of a sudden there'll be a lot less giant repositories of PII to worry about.