What We Give Up ⇥ lmnt.me
I used to instantly delete emails about a company’s policy changes, but now I’m taking a different approach. Before I delete the email, I delete the account.
[…]
But why am I the one who has to delete the account?
Companies are too comfortable modifying their policies passively over years, because they get to retain user data even if users don’t explicitly consent to a policy change.
Via Eric Schwarz:
I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment of this entire post. A few months ago, I decided to clean up old and unnecessary accounts and the amount of companies that either fought me on the request or hid behind the “you don’t live in California” excuse was frustrating. […]
My face is in several places. Back there, before the facial recognition algorithms and the generative AIs, I thought it would be good to show the face to pass… credibility? Confidence? I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t even a necessity as it’s today, because we didn’t have AIs that wrote convincing gibberish. Simpler times.
Three posts on a theme: our inability to forecast technological development or changing incentives. It once used to be prohibitive to retain data collections. When it was physical, it was the kind of thing only librarians and archivists could do, in buildings designed specifically for that purpose. There was built-in encouragement to purge old and irrelevant things. For a few decades now, it has become more costly to delete things — who knows what value some column in a database or a formerly active user’s account could generate? Better hold onto it.