Unfortunately you are not able to save or export your Buddy List.
Your data associated with AIM will be deleted after December 15, 2017.
Yes, you can manually save images and files to your computer until the morning of December 15, 2017.
Whatever you thought of AIM, it's stuff like this that makes you realize just how important software freedom is. Insane that there is just no way at all, without outright hacking the program (to the extent that hacking it is possible), to export your data, that you generated, and should by rights be yours to at the very least save (and not have to comb through potentially decades of chat history to export pictures and files one-by-one).
In the US, copyright law says you own what you create. What AOL's TOS must do is provide you with terms under which you license your stuff to AOL. Nowhere in the law does it say they have to give you a way to export the creations that you put into their system.
It was the users choice to abide by the user agreement?
I don't get how any reasonable framework can exist to say such detailed efforts at curating my identity must be pushed upon others?
You want a lifelong log of your discourse? Write it in a medium you control.
This is some hyper-active nationalist zeitgeist? You are not owed a say in any and every facet of life that touches you incidentally. It's never been the case "on the ground" in America.
For me, it's not the shitty things I said. It's the things that I thought were eloquent and insightful and informative and good, that now cause me to cringe. Kind of like looking at some old code, wondering what illiterate chimpanzee produced that mess, and realizing it was you...
That said, the first messages from my wife to me still make me smile, and I'm sure that my responses that make me cringe would make her smile.
I am again reminded that "youngsters these days" pretty much no longer have this option unless their online footprint is actively managed from Day One.
A part of me can't wait to see the President whose entire life can be cherry-picked from various servers and datacenters.
> A part of me can't wait to see the President whose entire life can be cherry-picked from various servers and datacenters.
This is much more crazy the more you think about. Right now there are already thousands if not millions of kids who will never be able to get a higher up political position because of what they shared on social media.
Sure, but the point is that they aren't retained, and in turn, leave young people in a position where they won't be blackmailed as adults for the shitty things they said as a teenager on platforms they thought were safe.
I'm not sure if there has been confirmation anywhere but it would be foolish to assume nobody is storing the messages you send on a closed platform. You don't know how it works so your only safe assumption is the worst case.
Not sure wha GP is referring to exactly. But at least in theory, it’s possible for Google to access the images, since they’re stored on Google servers. In practice this is very unlikely.
If you save the snaps to your camera roll, then any app with photos permissions has access to them (along with any metadata). But that’s obvious.
I am astounded of the faith people still have that companies and 3 letter agencies will not store and use their data forever, after all the revelations in the past years. And to think this is YCombinator News, not some random news website.
It's not faith, for me, I was just surprised by the confidence with which Xeoncross said that the data is copied. It sounded like this was just a public, documented fact that I missed.
The US just elected a president with decades of his incredibly shitty life cherry-picked by his detractors. I'm not sure that him having a Facebook profile at the age of 16 would have changed anything.
Before that we had a president photographed smoking a joint as a young man; before that we had a president convicted of DUI. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I actually took screenshots of my buddy list for just this reason. I will eventually put it into a text document. Seeing all my friends’ old screen names brought back so many memories. Was well worth the ~15 minutes it took me.
As an average HN reader, that's probably not a big problem. Surely, you're accustomed to researching and learning to use new pieces of software that do the things you'd like?
Huh... good question. I guess I would just assume that if they were deleting the data, then that must mean the've already sold it to Google, with some type of exclusively contract that mandates the removal.
This is ridiculous FUD, you're not compromising anybody's privacy by letting google drive do an OCR for you. The chance is extremely remote that there would somehow be a leak of the information to malicious parties or the like out of Google. Is this is all over the possibility of their advertising engine seeing keywords and giving you an ad based on it? Even if that's the case then that's not a privacy violation, no human ever can see how that's associated with a specific identity. Do you also avoid sending anything personal through gmail? Using google search at all? It's impractical tinfoil hat territory to act like there's any reason to be concerned about this OCR tool or any other instance of putting your files on Google. To my knowledge there has never been a hack of Google's data or any leak connecting any user's identity to PII.
For those who are concerned about the privacy and are mindful enough to care about the privacy of others, putting any information on anyone else's computer (like Google's servers) is a leak. You don't know what is being done with those data, intentionally or not. And that would be the case regardless of whether or not the software is free/libre---it's being sent across a network to a destination you do not control.
Of course, information is leaked all of the time. Depending on the software that you use, your (generally, not you specifically) address book on your phone might be available to numerous remote services, and that is directly parsable by third parties, and directly tied to you and your contacts. It's up to you to consider your threat model. mynewtb's threat model is different than yours.
I'm 28 and am a free software activist focusing heavily and user privacy and security, iving talks on those issues and meeting with my local school district to discuss how it impacts students.
When I was a teenager in middle school what almost feels like another lifetime ago, I used AIM.
>This is ridiculous FUD, you're not compromising anybody's privacy by letting google drive do an OCR for you.
So it depends on your threat model. If you care about rogue Google employees or other actors with 0-day exploits, then putting information into the hands of Google is a risk.
OK, that's the NSA, you can assume they know everything already. And in this case, the article mentions Yahoo, which is where the information was in the first place.
Indeed! The discussion is about rogue elements getting a Buddy List that was in AOL's hands, and therefore one should assume the TLAs already had it. Google might not have, unless you, or all your contacts, used the AIM/Google talk integration that existed for a bit, in which case they had it. Leaving aside that it's quite likely these connections already leave a Google-based data trail.
If that algorithm is building a model of me, then yes, it's clearly an invasion of my privacy. Google itself is the entity that I do not want to have access to a model of me.
Can you characterize what you consider an invasion of your privacy? Can you bound what you would find reasonable for someone else to characterize as an invasion of privacy?
Personally identifiable/private information about an individual being made available to another individual without consent from the subject. Gmail running an automated algorithm over your mail and suggesting an ad doesn't do this. If an actual person was reading all your mail, something you generally have an expectation of privacy in dealing with, or the advertising profiles advertisers use were leaked in such a way that they could be attached to the specific individuals they're related to, that would be an invasion of privacy.
"We realize this is bad as well and we are on your side. It's just that the cosmos (fortune) has cast this upon us all. Woe is us! ... Unfortunately, you'll need to buy our other product to do this."
I'd rather AOL not keep permanent logs of everything. They would now be for sale to the highest bidder.
As for my own data, Adium kept logs that I zipped up before I stopped using it. (And I have logs from "gaim" that predate using OSX/Adium.) I don't think it did pictures / files back when I used it, but I'd hope Adium would keep local copies of that too.
I found an old hard drive the other day and booted it up out of curiosity. What I found were old MSN Messenger chat logs from when I was a teenager. I spent all night reading them. It was... magical. Lots of vivid memories returning, I cried and laughed.
It's a damn shame that an entire generation is growing up with their chat logs locked in the cloud.
I haven't used their official client in decades, didn't even know it still existed. Trillian keeps your buddylist (along with backups) in the user data folder on Windows.
This is interesting. Did you pay for your conversations? I mean yeah you generated them but I don't expect to get conversations I've had via phone back and I'm paying for that service.
I think the idea of ownership is interesting here. I don't disagree that you should own it but then wouldn't you need to pay for it? Or did you pay for it by letting them sell your data to third party vendors? In that case, yeah you paid for it. What about Hacker News? Can you export your conversations here? Should you be able to? Meh, sorry mid-day musings.
Your data associated with AIM will be deleted after December 15, 2017.
Yes, you can manually save images and files to your computer until the morning of December 15, 2017.
Whatever you thought of AIM, it's stuff like this that makes you realize just how important software freedom is. Insane that there is just no way at all, without outright hacking the program (to the extent that hacking it is possible), to export your data, that you generated, and should by rights be yours to at the very least save (and not have to comb through potentially decades of chat history to export pictures and files one-by-one).