I’m a little surprised by the reaction to Appendable Data. We already published a proposal to store data in perpetuity (See #8 here SAFE Network Fundamentals: Context) and I thought we had this discussion with the community, but maybe it got missed somehow or there was a miscommunication from our end. Maybe we should work on better communicating potentially controversial issues in the future.
What’s to stop anyone from downloading “your” data and copying it? You can safely assume that everything that you’ve ever posted online is sitting somewhere on corporate and governmental servers. The illusion of being able to delete your data is just that, an illusion, and perhaps we shouldn’t encourage the fantasy notion that data once shared publicly can ever be taken back.
The challenge is in making sure that private data always stays private and does not get shared with the wrong people. However, once you’ve made the conscious decision to share something, it is impossible to reverse this, even on the SAFE Network. Note that this will still be different from the current internet where your data is already perpetual but you do not choose whether your data is private or not in the first place, and every action you’ve made on the clearnet is logged – forever.