Your Social Data Is Doomed

H

HardOCP News

[H] News
Joined
Dec 31, 1969
Messages
0
Let's be honest, do you really care that your "social data is doomed?" Are you really that worried about it? Does it keep you up late at night?

As we rely more and more on cloud storage used at public service providers, succumbing to the convenience and the utility of having access to one's "lifestream" from any endpoint device, we also put the collective records of our existence in the hands of third parties that do not necessarily have long-term data preservation as a core priority.
 
I have thought about this. I think most people believe that all data will last into perpetuity. It could be a weird hole in human history where we finally had the ability to generate unlimited amounts of records (I'm talking historical records), and yet no records were preserved. Where as in the past, records were such a precious thing that they went to great lengths to make sure they were preserved.

Sure, most of this will be around in 50 years or maybe 100 years. But what about 500 years? 2000 years? We don't realize that the people of tomorrow will put preference to their data just the same we do to ours. Our existence will get lost in the noise.....just like the people of the past. I just think, most people today don't believe this.
 
westrock2000 said:
Sure, most of this will be around in 50 years or maybe 100 years. But what about 500 years? 2000 years? We don't realize that the people of tomorrow will put preference to their data just the same we do to ours. Our existence will get lost in the noise.....just like the people of the past. I just think, most people today don't believe this.
Click to expand...

Well as time passes the past becomes inherently becomes noise. Retaining the data is one aspect. Anyone caring about the data in a 100 years is another matter as that data multiples faster than tribbles. We're still at in the infancy of the Information Age. There's so much yet to understand about so many aspects of the incredible amount of data that we are storing.
 
For me, with social media, I've never used my real name on anything. This goes back to well before myspace.

To this day you can do a google search on my real name and nothing comes up, nothing. I absolutely love that.

I have several hundreds of friends on Facebook but I use a miss-spelling of my middle name and an abbreviated last name.

I did have a twitter issue and that only came about from a non profit project I was apart of where my real name was listed in a few spots. That has since cleared up since the project was taken over ( we didn't do a good job ) and those entries were deleted.

Social media can suck my .......
 
heatlesssun said:
...Anyone caring about the data in a 100 years is another matter ...
Click to expand...

This. I don't care about my social media data now, I'll send one email to recover an account but two? Forget about it. I don't presume it's worth more than that to anyone else, much less in the future.

How many random diaries from 100 years ago do you care about?
 
SixFootDuo said:
Social media can suck my .......
Click to expand...

+1

I have never posted anything meaningful on social media and have no intention of ever doing so. I also never store anything in the cloud and have every device I own set to never sync (and have rooted most of my Android devices, and manually setup IPTables to block everything I didn't like to be SURE it doesn't sync).

Honestly, the only reason I have ever posted anything on either Twitter or Facebook was when doing so yielded a coupon for me to purchase computer hardware at a discount. Hell, I'd click "LIKE" on Verizon or Comcast if it gave me a coupon or discount on their service.

But other than that, I have no profile picture, no public information entered, etc and don't ever post any pictures, etc.

Personally, social media is a total waste of time.
 
Luckily I have such a hilariously common last name, good luck finding me. Especially considering I have my sparse facebook account locked down pretty hard. I don't use twitter or instapicture, or whatever the fuck else kids are using to send pictures of their junk to each other.

I think the funniest parts are when the next generation of kids can look back and see how much of a whore their mom was. Or hundreds of years from now people data mining and laughing their ass off at how selfish/stupid/weird we were.
 
SixFootDuo said:
For me, with social media, I've never used my real name on anything. This goes back to well before myspace.

To this day you can do a google search on my real name and nothing comes up, nothing. I absolutely love that.
Click to expand...

You've never owned property or went to High School?

The only thing that comes up for me is property records on the couple homes I've owned and that someone with my name went to a certain high school (one of the "find your classmates" sites).
 
mdburkey said:
Honestly, the only reason I have ever posted anything on either Twitter or Facebook was when doing so yielded a coupon for me to purchase computer hardware at a discount. Hell, I'd click "LIKE" on Verizon or Comcast if it gave me a coupon or discount on their service.
Click to expand...

I won't even do that.
If the only way I can get a coupon/discount is to "like" the company on facebook, I take my business elsewhere. To some place that will email a coupon to one of my junk email accounts.
 
Don't get my wrong, I like connecting with friends, chatting, seeing new pictures or videos, reading the stories, getting invites to parties, etc. It's great.

And for this privilege, I have to deal with a few ads here and there, etc. And that's fine. But, that's where it should stop.

But it doesn't.

I don't want to get into it but I have a lot of reasons. All the creepy stories about what really happens to your data, searches, pictures you upload, etc etc.

I just try and remove myself as much as possible out of all of that.
 
There's a very good Anne McCaffrey short story about this. Basically everyone gets online diaries etc, and a very long time later (over a century) students get to look at it as part of a course. I'm not going to spoil it, but it's worth reading.
 
Unless it's some picture that I accidentally deleted elsewhere, i wouldn't care. However, I can see how keeping this stuff might be interesting for descendants who are doing family research, but honestly, I just wish there was an easier way to delete stuff. I may not post much of consequence (and nothing that I'm embarrassed about, AFAIK), but if I could make everything from 5 years ago private, make stuff visible that I wanted to keep and then with one click delete all the private stuff from that year, that'd be awesome.
 
SixFootDuo said:
Don't get my wrong, I like connecting with friends, chatting, seeing new pictures or videos, reading the stories, getting invites to parties, etc. It's great.

And for this privilege, I have to deal with a few ads here and there, etc. And that's fine. But, that's where it should stop.

But it doesn't.

I don't want to get into it but I have a lot of reasons. All the creepy stories about what really happens to your data, searches, pictures you upload, etc etc.

I just try and remove myself as much as possible out of all of that.
Click to expand...

Just because you can't find yourself in google does not mean there isn't tons of data on you that connects the dots. Your friends and family easily put your real name to your profile, it just isn't done in search engines. Not to mention, soon as you get married, divorced, speeding/parking ticket etc etc. What was that one app where it would identify all the people in photos? One of your friends could have that app and a photo of you and now it ties to your facebook account and it was nothing you even did. Social media data collection is like pink eye, it will spread simply because someone touch something that someone else touched before you and now you have it and no one you work or live with has it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top