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Comment by cballard | Hacker News Reader

This seems unnecessarily angry. I suppose that this person wants to keep his data forever, but many people just don't care that much about their social media photos and the like.

I'd love it if Facebook and Twitter had a rolling deletion period option - everything more than six months old is shredded forever, as far as the service is concerned. While people can obviously store shared photos and this wouldn't actually destroy them, I'd like that new contacts wouldn't be able to go back and look through someone's entire history. It's like a more social and longer-lived Snapchat.

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> I suppose that this person wants to keep his data forever, but many people just don't care that much about their social media photos and the like.

"This person" is Jason Scott, who works as the Internet Archive and also heads up Archive Team (the loose band of internet folks who race to archive sites about to go dark).

He's a digital historian; his job is to save everything he can.

https://twitter.com/textfiles

https://archive.org/about/bios.php

http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

This seems to be more of a philosophical stance than an argument based on outcomes. It's also a call to think before knee-jerking "the cloud". And I do see the philosophical argument it has merit. But it does lack a business argument [for service consuming businesses] which will win out in most cases.

In other words, in real world usage, the cloud is more dependable and flexible than internal IT infrastructure providers, for most businesses.

That said, there is a good philosophical argument against the cloud.

> This seems to be more of a philosophical stance than an argument based on outcomes.

I agree, but its fundamentally simple: Always be in control of your own data, because no one else is going to be looking out for it.

This article doesn't really stand on its own; it comes across as a rambling diatribe by someone who is out of touch. If you have to know who the author of an article is to be persuaded by the argument given then it isn't very good. There are much better articles expressing this point of view.

Respectfully disagree, although I appreciate the reply.

>This article doesn't really stand on its own; it comes across as a rambling diatribe by someone who is out of touch.

Remember that next time you're red with rage because a cloud provider lost your data or a service you depended on is now bought/closed/gone.

My point was more on the quality of the article. The article's point is a valid one, if you can find it.

To constructively disagree, though: I keep backups. I have a Synology NAS device that I really like. But for your average person, I have to wonder - are their digital photos really safer on their laptop than they are on Facebook? Facebook is a fairly stable company. Laptops are lost, stolen, and damaged all the time. Files are accidentally deleted. People get viruses. People forget the password to their full drive encryption. When Facebook does bite the dust, it's hard to imagine that data just disappearing - it's incredibly valuable, and in the worst case, someone would buy it just to sell it back to people. Not ideal, but it isn't lost, and you had free storage for several years anyway.

Think about the future too though. Facebook strips exif and may have resized/recompressed your images. 20 years from now when we can do more super cool things with that data, the data won't exist in your FB photos.

Tangentially related, this is why I shoot RAW. Not because it might give me better pictures today, but because it WILL give me better pictures in 5-10-20 years. You can take a RAW today that was shot 5 years ago and pull detail that was impossible to pull when it was shot, and that ability will only improve.

Ideally, you'd want to keep RAW + JPEG. I'd be worried about reading some of the more obscure camera RAW formats in the far future. JPEG seems like a good backup (at the cost of the data loss you mentioned).

Yep, sometimes I convert to DNG for that reason, but that seems like pushing the problem out...

Safer on laptop vs. forgetting the password for facebook.

By making a technically inept strawman, it's reduced to an argument of which is more idiot proof.

The problem with idiot proof is that there's always a better idiot out there.

The argument here by the 'anti cloud' side is 'why not both?'. To argue for one side or the other exclusively is pointless.

> I'd love it if Facebook and Twitter had a rolling deletion period option - everything more than six months old is shredded forever, as far as the service is concerned.

I really like this idea. The biggest benefit is that it stops people expecting these services to act like an archive. With the current system it's easy to think "Oh I can just look this photo up again on Facebook if I want to". Instead we should be treating these services as publishing platforms while we maintain separate archival versions of our data.

An approach of "delete all personal data over X days old" would actually solve a lot of those companies' data protection issues. It would also make them less likely to be hacked, since they would be less tempting targets. Why try to hack some celebrity's chat app if you know all nudie pics are deleted after X days?

Or alternatively roll them into inaccessible private space after X amount of time determined by user.

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