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Comment by Globz | Hacker News Reader

What really freaks me out is the day Facebook die, what will happen to all of this data?

If you heard about the NCIX story where they basically abandoned their servers filled with users data (over 13 years of data) and someone scooped them up and tried to resell them on the black market, one could think that a similar fate is possible.

source : https://www.privacyfly.com/articles/ncix_breach/

Obviously if Facebook was going under it would probably trigger a huge legal process on how to handle the data but it clearly doesn't happen for smaller businesses...

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If they go under, they'll of course sell off their assets to the highest bidder. Their shareholders will demand they do so. Or it'll be auctioned off as part of declaring bankruptcy.

Your data is their primary asset.

Facebook as a company will never die. It's too diversified. Facebook as a product will die in the next 10 years.

And it won't matter because the data will be rolled over to drive ads on Instagram and Snap and other attention-properties.

Facebook is the IBM of social media. It's too big to die, and too big to do anything good.

> What really freaks me out is the day Facebook die, what will happen to all of this data?

Interestingly, Facebook owns your data. I believe if they wanted to, they could close the company tomorrow and put a facebook.tar.xz of everything they collected on archive.org or somewhere else.

I wonder if archive.org could actually store that much data.. and how long it would take to create a tar.xz of it.

What file systems would support a tar that big?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

If they did that with any European data, they would soon face criminal charges.

(Except if a European office of Facebook did it, then the nationality doesn't matter.)

No. You own your data stored at Facebook. Facebook just have license to use "as they wish" while respecting your privacy settings (i.e. uploading facebook.tax.xz is definitely not according to privacy settings of most people).

At least that written and TOS or so.

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