My ask for one big guide to data export, with service-specific guides to maximizing both export reliability, export completion, and data deletion/obfuscation from invasive services when leaving them!
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Tl;dr: Data liberty is far more important to privacy than we’ve been treating it as.
Obligatory:
I doubt this is a completely new idea; I just wanted to throw in my own support for it.
I think it’s also possible that some of my ideas are incomplete or misguided, so please feel free to discuss below. I wouldn’t know if they were anyway until I put them out there.
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With mainstream platforms doubling down on digital surveillance, age verification and chat control, I think it’s time to have this conversation: I think sentimentality is what keeps a lot of regular people from going private.
Personal story time:
Currently, I keep a ton of accounts. Back when I didn’t know better, I made several accounts on each platform and treated that, in my unknowing mind, as compartmentalization.
I deeply regret that now, but what it does mean is that my digital life is bloated with innumerable accounts on mainstream platforms, all hosting troves of sentimental and sensitive information, which I want to move off these platforms as soon as possible: but not before I can ensure both that I have exported the information in a complete fashion, and actually taken as much from the platform as I could.
It’s not such a personal story, now that I think about it, because it’s a staggeringly common situation.
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Deletion is easy, but parting with your memories, as well as a lot of practical information, is not. The most privacy-savvy of us tend to think of accounts on invasive platforms like parasites existing mainly to extract data from us, which is not exactly untrue. Attached is the unspoken sense among some that those hesitant to leave are simply foolish or ineffectual. As such, within the privacy community, there’s a bit of shame surrounding the fact that to the average person, these are accounts housing years of sentimentally (or practically) valuable memories, sometimes taking the form of pictures, layouts, metadata… things that may lose their formatting/legibility/usability when exported, or not be included at all.
- (“Replying to” tags are an example. I remember exporting important chats from a popular platform, only to find that all the ‘replying to’ tags were obliterated, rendering much of the conversation hard to decipher.)
These platforms induce vendor lock-in by introducing themselves as the standard when we didn’t know better, taking entire portions of our lives hostage, and then making information export spotty or unreliable. After all, they’re only obligated to serve customers while they stay, right? We need better alternatives.
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It isn’t just sentimentality, though.
(https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/is-it-better-to-keep-an-unused-account-or-delete-it/12602) This story is an example of a time when a user performed the necessary/intuitive export actions, and simply found that they deleted nothing on the server-side: only walled themself off in most ways from their own information.
There are more such accounts: (https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/vdm6sr/til_discord_doesnt_actually_delete_messages_when/) They’re all over the internet.
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I think that to leave an account with peace of mind, most people need to know
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The myriad ways mainstream platforms make leaving difficult, and how to combat them: sorted by platform.
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The gaps in native export functions, and scripts that fill those gaps
- (Example: In many platforms hosting messaging, such as Instagram and Discord, there simply exists no native function to delete every message you sent. )
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Which services would keep your information while giving you the illusion of deletion, and how to best fight that before you 1. leave 2. cut only yourself off from your information and 3. have no means of changing things anymore/?
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Lists of open-source export/deletion scripts, sorted by service?
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This has already been mentioned here, but a more complete guide to backups would also be really helpful!
Say you want to leave a number of platforms-- par for the course in a transition towards privacy. Say you also want to bring along the parts of your life that these platforms have taken hostage: not necessarily everyone will, but it’s not such a niche case, is it?
What if instead of scouring the internet a separate time for each platform you wanted to purge, cobbling together a twigs and sap solution from different scripts, and feeding exponentially into privacy exhaustion, we had a community-compiled list of reliable, complete and privacy-preserving export scripts/services?
(These would include scripts that focus on mass deletion, scripts that focus on a faithful export, and guides on what certain platforms might do to trip you up when you try to leave. There can also be case-specific recommendations: some people will want to focus on texts, some others on layouts, code or media, etc.)
If I had such a guide, I think I’d be able to sit down and actually leave these invasive services in a matter of weeks. That’s trivial, though. What might matter is the millions of people like me who also will.
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Thus, I think that having more complete guides on not just how to delete accounts, but how to extract data, maximize its faithfulness, and purge everything you can from the server-side before finally leaving a service, will be a substantial boon for privacy communities. Especially in the wake of age verification, chat control, and other privacy-undermining laws.
Think about it: the inevitable consequence of people being able to leave invasive services more freely is more coming into privacy-respecting platforms, which have always suffered from the networking effect.
Data liberty is pretty integral to privacy. We haven’t treated it that way: it gains nowhere near as much guidance and resources as simple alternative service recommendations. I think it would be cool to start changing that, little by little.
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End notes:
I’m somewhat aware that some of these things might run afoul of some platforms’ TOS, making a reputable community guide tough. I’m going to leave that discussion to people better suited to such discussions: and I hope that this discussion about data liberty is still one worth having, even if there’s a substantial logistical roadblock.
In the end, I don’t think I’m a fool for wishing for freer data export when it may go against TOS: I think these tech companies are exploitative for using their power to set industry standards that are hostile towards data and user liberty.
Please feel free to correct me wherever I may have gone wrong. If what I call for exists in some form, feel free to point me to it: even so, I still hope that the increased discussion from this post will help the initiative.