How do you feel about social media archiving tools such as Pushshift?

Merry
2022-01-19T18:47:57Z

On and off throughout the years, I have attempted to make my online footprint as small as possible, taking steps such as:

using pseudonyms on social media

creating a new account every year or so

overwriting old posts with a new message blanking out my original post

"deleting" posts after a few days if the account has a higher probability to be tied to my real life

The last point, I put quotations around deleted because I understand that once I post something, it is not ever really deleted but it adds a barrier of entry to trying to dig into my personal life. Pushshift comes up because, try as I might, I seem to have difficulty getting accounts removed from their searches. Additionally, I think they allow you to download reddit data in bulk so even if I were able to get my name removed from the search results, the data could still exist on someone's hard drive, somewhere.

From your perspective, are services like Pushshift, that archive people's information without their explicit knowledge, ethical? On the one hand, I think of detestable content that users might post then delete later to avoid accountability. On the other hand, I think of people like me who want to keep their data footprint as small as possible because of the crazies who might utilize this information to do harm.

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~talk/102z/how_do_you_feel_about_social_media_archiving_tools_such_as_pushshift

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