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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Yes. Thousands of ASL's are gone forever.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Like a train crash in slow motion - good.

> 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.

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.)

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

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

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.

They are retained by the other organizations. It's good that at least snapchat itself removes it's copies though.

Who are the other organizations? You sound super sure, I feel like I missed a news story recently that you read.

I'm not sure if there has been confirmation anywhere but it would be foolish to assume nobody is storing the messages you send on a closed platform. You don't know how it works so your only safe assumption is the worst case.

We all thought Usenet was ephemeral and then Dejanews revealed themselves...

Didn't know that, who gets copies?

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.

I am astounded of the faith people still have that companies and 3 letter agencies will not store and use their data forever, after all the revelations in the past years. And to think this is YCombinator News, not some random news website.

It's not faith, for me, I was just surprised by the confidence with which Xeoncross said that the data is copied. It sounded like this was just a public, documented fact that I missed.

Safe assumptions:

1) The network is compromised.

2) Users have hostile intent.

3) (Cloud) storage is publicly visible.

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.

Same with Zuck.

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

Roy Moore?

Sorry, couldn't resist ;)