Public data is incompatible with secrecy. Expunged records still appear in newspapers archives if the local reporter on the Crimes beat captured the proceedings. IMO, "expunged" means removed from Official court records - not from the public memory, including newspapers, archived websites, police blotters and prosecutors' files.

The fact that you get it out from your criminal record doesn't mean they get forgotten. Think about a paper writing about your crime. That will be public and archived forever.

As someone who spent the last 2 days figuring out how best to digitise my father's old Hi8, Digital8 and MiniDV tapes, I take umbridge with this!

Keep originals if you can, but make copies ASAP, as close to lossless as possible. Don't depend on the right hardware being around in the future.

I can see the value in this, but .. originals, and the gear to read them, do not last forever. Plus for many formats the act of reading puts wear on the physical artifacts. So if you want to actually use the information, you have to format shift it to digital in the first place. And then you're back to the same question as the rest of us, how to maintain the bits.

I don't understand this phrase, are you able to explain it?

There is inherent inefficiency in government accountability efforts. I'm ok with that.

In general it makes sense to shift this part to business, if data is valuable, there will be market and services. Probably problem is how fast they nuked without grace period.

If you intentionally post something publicly, it's public. Full stop.

The tricky part is dealing with inadvertent or malicious (i.e. some other party), posting of private information to a public space. That's really hard to deal with on multiple levels.

For one, the archives would retain the information and scrubbing it is effectively impossible.

Secondly, legitimate things which should remain public (i.e. were posted publicly, are of public interest, etc.) can be argued to have been inadvertently or maliciously posted. So you need some way to moderate and create rulings for each individual case, which quickly becomes untenable due to the sheer volume of information being posted and the inordinate amount of time required to investigate vs. post.

That's a really good question.

In my head, I'm imagining someone early in the morning posting a flyer up on a bulletin board downtown.

Throughout the day many folks walked by and took photos of the flyer with their cell phone.

At the end of the day, the original person came back and removed the flyer.

IMO, at the time that the folks took the photo of the flyer, that flyer was public information. It remains public information even after the flyer is removed[0].

This isn't a great analogy of mine, and has plenty of holes, but was interesting to me after I read your comment. I know it was in the context of doxxing, but I think it's pretty interesting philosophically.

I think something similar applies to photos taken of other people in public spaces. Both the person who took the photo and the subject of the photo are no longer in that physical public space, but the actions took place within that space.

I think something similar applies to digital "public spaces". But what does a public space even mean in the context of walled gardens[1], etc.

[0] you then run into the question of what happens if someone posts non-public information, publicly? [1] are digital walled garden communities that different from physical communities that gate access, whether free or paid. Whether information shared within those contexts are public or private is an interesting thread as well.

Which data set are you thinking this might apply to?

I agree. I do not understand how this is perceived as an political issue and thus got flagged.

Climate change is perceived for some reason politically too and not get flagged so often.

No it isn't. It's merely a cause du jour for data hoarders to justify their hobby in light of this Chicken Little hysteria.

30 years ago it was thought collecting every issue of magazines like TV Guide was important. No one even knows what that is anymore.

No one is ever going to look at 99% of this data. In the meantime, send more hard drives for my NAS!!

git-annex is not exactly blockchain but because of the way it operates -- storing files by their hashes, the whole Git commit structure -- it gives you several useful things: It becomes easy to clone repositories while guaranteeing that clones are identical. It also becomes easy to ensure that files are not tampered with.

https://blog.archive.org/2023/10/20/celebrating-1-petabyte-o...

Though given the space in general and some of the people involved it all should be audited very carefully.