This is likely going to be of the form, you can update your site, but people will be able to see your old site anyway. As I say though, they already can, until we can stop screenshots, photo’s of images etc. then this will be the case, I claim anyway.
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Persistent Data was one term used many times rather than forever data
I prefer Persistent. But find that some people do not understand persistent when related to data.
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I don’t understand all the technical aspects of this, but I still think one should be able to make stuff visible or invisible on_ones_own site as one pleases. This, of course, does not apply to screenshots or copies of said site that are hosted by or linked to by somebody else. I think people should be able to see the history of a site iff they have linked to it at the time the data was visible.
There are tools in the world. Bad people do bad things with those tools. Stupid people do stupid things with those tools. Good people do good things with those tools. Most people aren’t one dimensional, so usually people do a mixture of bad, stupid and good things with the tools they have access to. I don’t understand why SAFEnet has to protect people from doing the things they do with SAFEnet .
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How though do you square the circle of lost data/knowledge that could be beneficial later? So allowing deletion is actually allowing us to lose data again, for whatever reason. Say you had a paper that showed you can run a car on water or more realistically a scientific breakthrough. You put it on your website, then whoever forces removal as it will upset some corporates profits or a governments control of people or whatever. So you see it is an all or nothing approach the network takes. Protect all data, all of the time, not selectively based on human desires.
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A compromise would be to have a ‘permanence switch’ on an account or website or some area of an account - maybe there’s a _permanent container (or the converse: _deletable).
This is more how I understood the current design, but I see you have further ideas David!
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There is quite a difference between an invention allowing cars to run on water and a drunken selfie, and I think it would be useful if the network provided the tools for this distinction to be made. The one making this distinction should, of course, be the one publishing it in the first place. Nobody should be forced into removing anything. And if one wants to forever preserve something somebody else has posted, that should be possible simply by making a copy by way of linking to it.
I can imagine that pretty quickly some big corporation like Google would start vacuuming up all sites, including misspellings and drunken selfies, on Safenet and storing the info forever or indefinitely for their own purposes. This is unavoidable. But does it really have to be a feature built into the Safenet itself? Maybe it does, but I just don’t see it. In any case this particular feature and the reasoning behind it should, if implemented, be explained well.
@happybeing mentions a “permanence switch”. That sounds very reasonable to me, unless there are technical obstacles. But even if one has switched permanence off when posting that drunken selfie, and somebody else makes a copy of it, then that copy should remain forever, provided the copier switched permanence on. I just don’t see why the network should make that decision instead of the user.
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Yes, that would be a compromise 
I am not sure though whether it is not just simpler and more honest to never delete any data. I am also not sure that humans would be the best to decide which data can be deleted. It is an interesting debate though.
I agree, from several angles, but disagree from many others. Say for instance Hitler said, oh you know what that was a drunken selfie moment there, let’s erase that? I know that is extreme, but it is what we allow when we allow a person to decide which version of history they want the world to know. OR a scientist that does a bunch of work, say string theory, then decides oh let’s erase that, years later more scientists spend years making the same mistakes?
I think this is much deeper than a drunken selfie in reality.
I think you can be certain they or somebody will.
The point being, deleting/special accounts etc. are all more work, more bugs and slows down the network, wastes more power etc. etc.
Neither do I, I mean makes a decision, if the network saves everything then there is no decision, it is just simpler and very likely more honest.
Interesting debate btw, I don’t mean to be an ass here 
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It could be solved with another layer or abstraction. The ownership of chunks would be stored as a separate entity, searchable through the chunk’s ID, in the form of anonymous payment receipts that would be revokable through a cryptographic “kill switch”.
It’s true that data would no longer be arbitrarily permanent, but anybody could ensure a certain piece of data is permanent by claiming ownership and never revoking it.
It is more complex but probably not much more. But I’m not the one working on it, so I do admit it’s easy for me to say that 
The performance wouldn’t have to be affected because spot checks could be collect and delete chunks that are no longer referenced whenever there’s some spare time or bandwidth.
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If my drunken selfie, poorly timed tweet or embarrasing teenage poetry is stored as private data, with access granted to others by means of a cryptographic key, couldn’t I revoke that key to effectively make it invisible? If I can do that (which would seem to me to be satisfy a very human need to have past misdemeanours forgiven and forgotten), then the issue becomes one of how to ensure information that should be public remains so. This is a pretty tricky topic, it strikes me, in which we should be wary of simplistic answers. We might need different rules for machine data and human data for example. Maybe that’s something for the app layer (paging @neo …)
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If the data stored was encrypted with the original public key, then changing your key is only going to effect newly stored data; the old data, encrypted with the old key will still be present.
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I agree with this. All I’m saying is that Safenet maybe could provide the additional tools to make certain types of one’s own data disappear if one wishes to do so. Just like I would like the possibility to buy and use a chainsaw either with or without a handguard. Usually it’s good to have, but sometimes it gets in the way.
Personally, I think persistent data is just something we are going to have to come to terms with, no matter how unsavoury that is going to be in some cases. If not safenetwork, then it will be something else.
Censorship resistance isn’t just about others stopping something being seen, but also about you stopping something being seen. The latter may be through the former applying pressure too. Making something truly impossible to delete is a very powerful thing, but it carries both positives and negatives.
Humanity really does need to start taking responsibility for their actions though and we can’t just erase the stuff we don’t like and hide the stuff that we don’t think people should see. This will mean coming to terms with this concept and then finding ways to deal with it, to confront it, rather than hiding away from it.
I suspect people will voluntarily ask to filter gruesome content, but it will be their choice. There will be no printer to smash, no broadcast to block, no paper to withhold. It will be alien and scary, but society will change, cope and move on. Moreovet, it will be a level playing field, with all the advantages this brings.
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Reading all the above posts - i think the “BEST” option would be to engage some known marketing firms and let them develop the message and pitch. Select firms with good track record in building brands, awareness and gaining users. MAidsafe team should “ONLY” help explain the product to them and any info the firm needs. Tech folks should not try to frame the message.
The above discussion is ample evidence that there is no clarity on how this should be marketed. There are just some hypothesis that this is what people want and those are based on individual judgements. Let the professionals do the marketing and pitching.
This is my HUMBLE request to MAIDSAFE team. (personally, I also agree that it should not be branded as a new internet. Just something as simple as “most secure network ever built” and stuff like that. Everyday Tom and Harry dont care about the underlying layer/s. And people generally dont easily adopt something like “new internet”. Thats a no go to begin with. I personally wouldn’t unless I am a tech geek and I know there are more people like me.
Please leave the marketing to a known firm. Spend the effort in researching/finding one and educating them about the product. This may also be trial and error in the beginning. Engage a few firms, explain the product to them individually, let each of them come up with a pitch, those could be shared with the community to get an opinion and then go with them. Also, if traction is not obtained, shortlist a couple of firms and also engage a second firm in parallel. This is also a learning process along the way. There may also be different messages for different audiences that need to be designed by the marketing firms - separate message for protocol/stack developer community and a separate one for layman users. Perhaps a separate message for enterpreneurs, and a separate message for App developers.
I’ll just end by saying that "Marketing’ and pitching it the right way to the respective audience is the MOST imp. component that defines success/failure for a product. Not a decision to be taken lightly. 10 years of hard labor from dev team will be wrapped into it. Think, Plan, execute, learn, and re-execute. This will/should be the process
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Just a quick note to @Sascha, @prtscr and others, it’s called the Safe Network, not SafeNet as the latter is a separate company.
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Maybe so, but it’s a pretty big leap and so needs to be introduced carefully. Many wars have been fought historically over the control of information after all.
More immediately, if people fear, rightly or wrongly, that they have no control over personal information they put on SAFE then they will simply use an alternative network.
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I agree. I never said it would be easy to market! 
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Actually your private files are stored with self encryption and you are given a datamap in order to read that file. So if you give them your datamap then they can read that file forever and a day.
If you stored it in a MD and was encrypted by you then you can delete, rewrite or whatever that MD (or set of MDs) and that image is gone.
BUT as always what if your friends decided it was so good they copied the image to their own hard drive. Then like now no matter what you do you are at the mercy of your friends.
So the moral of the story is don’t take that selfie and store it and give your friends access to it in the first place.
Unfortunately the network does not have the knowledge of what is yours and what is not. Even if you lost anonymity and stored your ID with each and every file then you may have passed “ownership” to another person (eg wedding photographer). So who has the right to delete now? The network doesn’t know who you gave the datamaps to.
I did suggest adding another type of data in addition to persistent immutable files and MDs. And that was temporary immutable files and marked as such. So then the file has a user supplied limited (event) lifetime and like bitcoin block rate you can have a very rough estimate of the minimum time it will last. And its cheaper to store the file. These could be for applications like word processors that love temp files, or test images, or whatever. Obviously there would be a maximum that one can specify so its not just a cheap way for storing long term files. Say a max estimated time of 30 days. OR 60 days.
Yep, its a new concept to some people. Those of us who grew up with books and journals (hand written) lived with long life for documents and books. For instance there are still some 1000 - 2000 year old documents and some written in stone that are very much older. Just look at the documents lasting hundreds of years in England alone. Its massive and contains a lot of sensitive information.
Now we can have network lifetime data and potentially copied over to the new network when it arrives in a few decades or whenever. Just like we had with stone, books, hand written stuff, just better.
Yes I can see filtering services, rather like adblock, where people choose which filtering they want (spam, malware, gruesome, political, whatever) and that gives them SAFE as if certain data did not exist.
And there is another safenet elsewhere from memory unrelated to computers or data networks.
And I found yet another that is used by a credit union https://www.safefed.org/products-services/online-access/safenet
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Just rename it SKYnet and nuke the existing internet from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure
10 points for anyone naming the link.
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I think it is impossible to market the SAFE network to the general public. People are unable to keep up with the existing internet, let alone starting to use a NEW internet. There must be a killer app to get people’s attention. This should be an app that cannot exist on the current internet. The closest that comes to mind is a personal database of your medical history. Hospitals are having a hard time in exchanging medical patient records, simply because hospitals/GPs etc have different databases that cannot “talk” to each other in a private/meaningful way. Since your medical history is your data in the safe network, you can enable hospitals to view your medical record when needed. You could even think of some kind of smart contract that grants (restricted) access to your data to a certain hospital when you are in the vicinity of that hospital, in the case that you are not able to manually grant access for that hospital. If such a killer app shows that SAFE network is really unhackable, I think we could see some serious interest from governments/banks/etc.
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