INACTIVE ACCOUNTS
Right now, it’s cheap to hoard all this data in the cloud. “The cost of storage long term continues to fall,” said George Blood, who runs a business outside Philadelphia digitising information from obsolete media, creating 10 terabytes of data per day, on average.
“They may charge you more for the cost of the electricity – spinning the disk your data is on – than the storage itself.”
Big technology companies don’t often prompt people to minimise their data footprints, until, that is, they near the end of their free storage space. That’s when companies force them to decide whether to move to the paid plans.
There are signs, though, that the companies don’t want to hold on to our data forever: Most have policies allowing them to delete accounts that are inactive for a year or more.
Aware of the potential value of data left behind by those who euphemistically go “inactive”, Apple recently introduced a legacy contact feature, to designate a person who can access an Apple account after the owner’s death.
Google has long had a similar tool, prosaically called inactive account manager. Facebook created legacy contacts in 2015 to look after accounts that have been memorialised.
And that really is the ultimate question around personal archives: What becomes of them after we die? By keeping so much, more than we want to sort through, which is almost certainly more than anyone else wants to sort through on our behalf, we may leave behind less than previous generations because our accounts will go inactive and be deleted.
Our personal clouds may grow so vast that no one will ever go through them, and all the bits and bytes could end up just blo ..
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