Woman loses 20 years of 'digital memories' after Meta deletes her accounts | Hacker News Reader

Woman loses 20 years of 'digital memories' after Meta deletes her accounts

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14 pointsbundie8 comments

It's 2026 and people still haven't figured out that big platforms are not their friend. It's both amazing and sad.

I wonder if there's any way of getting it into people's heads that they need to maintain their own data under their own care, but I fear the big platforms sink way too much money into propaganda to convince people to continue trusting them.

It's not only about "getting it into their heads", it's also about feasiblity. Not many people have the capability to do that given real life constraints and demands.

Maybe with AI at some point, we 'll get a consumer AI box with enough intelligence, compute, storage and low price that it can handle those things without putting mental load on the consumer to maintaint and or set it up.

Nah sorry but that's bullshit. Storage doesn't have to be in the cloud; that's just convenience. If you want to be safe for cheap and easy, use an external HDD and enjoy your life.

If you want the convenience of having your stuff stored in the cloud without backup, which is already asking for trouble, then yea, that's a luxury that doesn't come for free.

That being said, one person can easily self-host for a whole family, friend group or entire neighborhood.

And your response gets even dumber with bringing up AI. I won't bother explaining why, it should be self-evident if you stop and think for a second about the AI business model.

It's 2026 and people still think it's not about convenience.

If they have to "maintain their own data under their own care" and it's inconvenient, they'll prefer the convenient option, even if it means ocassionally losing their stuff or lacking privacy.

So you don't get any disappointment or regret from the article at all? It reads to you like someone merely lamenting that it happened to be them while fully aware that they chose the risk and are fully responsible for this outcome?

Don't be silly, tech companies market themselves to people as reliable. They do their best to give people the impression that they don't need to weigh reliability against convenience and that they can have the best of both worlds.

Articles like this one exist because people need to be reminded that this isn't, in fact, the case. What they fail to do is present any proper alternatives to really give people the chance to make that decision.

And hey, if someone knows these things happen, knows how easy it is to set up a family nextcloud plus some backup system, and still choose to take their chances with the corpo slopware, then at that point it's really just their own fault.

>So you don't get any disappointment or regret from the article at all? It reads to you like someone merely lamenting that it happened to be them while fully aware that they chose the risk and are fully responsible for this outcome?

You don't have to be "fully aware" of the risk to chose convenience.

In fact, the biggest convenience is not even bothering to research and think about risks.

I didn't say the chose the most convenient option after researching risks and features. I said they chose the most convenient option, period.

Of course, you need to have critical thinking and try not to blindly hand over all your data to large platforms, but it’s as if you want to trust what you’re using. Otherwise, it’s just like if every time I wanted to eat a sandwich, instead of just eating it, I also took indigestion pills just in case — it sounds super inconvenient and, well, unnecessary.

Yes, the problem here is that people see these services as the sandwich rather than the person handing out sandwiches for free.

The sandwich is yours and you should be able to trust it, but you shouldn't rely on the expectation that the same guy will be handing out sandwiches for free at the same corner every day. They might just not be there one day, or simply tell you "I don't like your face, you don't get sandwiches anymore".

Facebook is the sandwich guy, as are google, microsoft, etc. Enjoy the free sandwiches, but plan in a way where you wouldn't just starve without them.

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