The
As people move their personal lives online, memories that once ended up in scrapbooks or taped to the fridge are now in the custody of companies that might disappear tomorrow — or at least radically reinvent themselves. To its credit, Friendster has given users, many of whom haven’t logged in for years, time to retrieve old material. Former users may assume they’ve already moved any information they care about. But we don’t always know what we’ll miss. By the time former Friendster users discover their nostalgia for, say, the Howard Dean campaign, those photos will have long vanished.
There’s a real privacy threat when embarrassing information lingers forever online, and users need to be able to delete their data. But by the same token, information entrusted to the cloud shouldn’t just disappear. Both choices — to erase, and also to keep — must remain in the hands of users.
