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The most important privacy enhancement they could make is nowhere to be found in this settlement:

Provide easy means for users to permanently delete all information, posts, comments and messages, as well as a setting to automatically expire and delete all if the above as desired. This should include backups.




This is useless because of external backups, and not desirable because of things like posts becoming evidence of criminality.


Not useless at all. If websites are required, by law, to protect your information, seek permission to share it and also institute retention policies based on your preferences, this would be a huge improvement in privacy.

If by external backups you mean my cousin copying one of my photos and saving it or something like that, sure, I take your point. However, I think you understand exactly what I mean. There's a massive difference between that and Facebook having an entire record of my life, complete with tags, pictures and classifications, all of which I have exactly zero control over.

And, no, social media does not exist to facilitate law enforcement investigations. If that is their primary purpose they need to disclose it. It so happens that it can be used that way, but we should not pass legislation based on the possibility of law enforcement using these databases to effectively spy and reach for people's private information.

Cautionary tales abound, incuding:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...




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