Under the GDPR, EU residents have gained several important rights over their data. (Privacy laws are weak in the US and non-existent in China.) One of them is the “right to be forgotten,” which tries to balance the right to privacy against the public’s need to know history.
This post is not about these rights, but the actions that we can take to improve our remembrance of things past, i.e., removing details that might have been interesting for a few days or months but no longer matter to us.
As examples, consider emails you wrote to someone you no longer date, silly photos of events long ago, or tweets in reply to a once-urgent-but-now-forgotten conversation.
The main idea of deleting, cleaning or summarizing your past is not to whitewash it but to align with our natural tendency (or ability) to forget events (both good and bad) over time. This tendency is very useful, but it loses its power if our digital detritus is saved and shown to us (or others) when we (they) are looking for something else.
Even worse, the rise of artificial intelligence means that companies that are storing our data on various clouds (dropbox, iCloud, google drive, etc.) are increasingly likely to mine those data to build algorithms that they will use to make money.
Thus, in the past few years, I have:
- Deleted my Facebook account.
- Deleted all but one of my 2000+ tweets.
- Deleted a decade of photos from my computer.
- Deleted all but the past 3 years of email from the cloud.
(Note that I have kept copies of all these deleted items on a back-up hard drive — just in case — but I kinda doubt I’ll ever look at that stuff. Years ago, I threw away the negatives from a few thousand rolls of film I shot while traveling for five years. I’ve not missed them. I still have most of my travel diaries from that period, but I have no temptation to read the detailed scribbles of my 25-year-old self.)
My one-handed conclusion is that you should take control of your digital memory, first to protect yourself from the bots and second to free your memory to keep what’s really important. This control takes more effort than letting things pile up, but the resulting privacy and calm should make the effort worthwhile.
I’ve never used any cloud server storage service, not trusting managers of some set of dispersed servers all over the world to safeguard my stuff. I might if I traveled, but I stopped flying when I retired in 2005, burned out on airports. So I have nothing to delete from cloud services.
I’ve tried to delete my Facebook account, but like a zombie it keeps coming back.
Glad to see that your still alive and well.