This reminds me of the long conversations that I used to have with family members and friends several years ago. With their continuous requests to create my own Facebook profile so I can keep in contact with them and with their activities as well as to share my whereabouts. I always used the same argument to reject these suggestions — "I don't want Facebook to have too much data about me, more than the data that you already provided".

I got used to the looks of disbelief, thinking that I was some sort of hermit, an antisocial.

I also got tired of answering the frequent "Why don't you have Facebook?" questions.

I remember the last time I had this conversation with someone, last year (2017) around August. I found a new love partner, and after the long intimate talks on the phone, they requested the usual "intimate pictures", not necessarily sexual but certainly sexy. While I have no tabus with regards to my sexuality, having an understanding of how the Internet works, I have always refused to send that type of images/videos/audios, and I always tried to be patient with the other person to explain my constant denials. Unfortunately, expecting a non-tech-savvy person to understand how data moves around the Internet is most of the time based on hope, and even if they understand, they ultimately don't care because the result doesn't change: you don't get to share something with them and that affects personal interactions.

I am sure that the deletion of media files in services like Facebook has never meant to be absolute. Many of my colleagues believe the same thing that I believe: Facebook and other services do not actually delete data, they just mark it as "deleted" and purge it only if they need the space. The same way a hard drive works, you don't really delete a picture when you hit the "delete" key, nor even if you clear the "trash" folder, the data is still there, where it was, it just loses the links to the metadata.

It is sad how this information becomes news only when bad things happen.