Re:The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
by lolc on Sunday December 08, 2019 @03:06PM
(#21737955)
To me, it often seems like technology does have a moral imperative it follows: It chooses transparency in all kinds of situations. That's not to say that technology consciously chooses to impart transparency. In reality it's just too damn expensive to erease traces in data. Which leads to transparency by default.
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Re:The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
by FillardMillmore on Sunday December 08, 2019 @03:19PM
(#21738029)
I'm not sure if I'm convinced that technology leads to transparency by default. I don't think it would be too expensive to drop a particular record or table from a database if the incentive was there. Of course, when you consider distributed systems in which data for an entity or transaction is spread across many different systems and infrastructures, it would be too expensive to track down and eliminate all traces of the data.
But could you elaborate on what you mean by 'transparency by default'?
> I don't think it would be too expensive to drop a particular record or table from a database if the incentive was there.
Copying is so cheap these days that it often becomes intractable to erease it all.
> But could you elaborate on what you mean by 'transparency by default'?
I often observe that we think that some things should be private but that we do not spend the effort to keep them that way.