How much of the data do you think is collected, kept, and used long term? i.e. what proportion and amount
(I realize this might be a better question for privacy, but I managed to get myself banned for flaming some piracy folks)
Pretty much everybody is forgotten. Our data may persist but who will want to look at it outside specific arbitrary examples.
No
Terry Pratchett wrote, “Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?” but I don’t think he had data brokers in mind when he wrote it in 2004.
You could argue that no one is ever truly remembered. Even people who are mentioned in history books and have their specific deeds remembered and preserved…
…within a couple of hundred years, there are no other humans left alive anywhere on the planet who personally knew said famous person. No one who knew them on any personal level, any more deeply that the handful of cold facts written down about them on record.
We are meant to be forgotten. Just another thing we have to come to terms with regarding our existence.
The universe will remember you forever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hiding_theorem
I thought this was gonna be a deep philosophical question… but then read past the first sentence.
I personally think that as long as our data has value to someone it will stay. Unfortunately(?) I think a vast majority of it will go the way of the void.
Space has cost.
Ironically that means platforms that cannot produce value from old messages will probably delete them. All these bytes are on storage media that probably wont last 10 years let alone 100+. Also never mind that the data itself will have to be on a media that other systems can use…so the html of today may not be used in 50 years or so, so reduces its value further. “Value” is subjective, but for most commercial platforms, its literally the amount of $$ they can get for the data. As soon as the data reaches 0$, it gets deleted. And as things get older and people die, these messages/data/etc… get lost, deleted, corrupted, or incompatible with the technology of the day.
But short term, everyone is pulling our data because it has a VERY high value. So dont say anything on the internet you would not want your parents finding out :)
Almost everything that has any value to someone will be collected. The actual data wont live long, but all the profiling done with it, will last slightly longer than I will.
