We have tons of diaries from people in 18th and 19th centuries, and they provide a uniquely intimate glimpse of life in the past.
If there's any upside to our lives being recorded in such great detail, it's that it will be a treasure trove for our descendants long after we're gone.
My prediction: If Facebook looses popularity like MySpace: it will hold onto dead people's profiles as long as possible, until it finally goes out of business or its skeleton team of developers makes a critical mistake. Their business at that point will basically be like that of domain squatters. They'll even start sharing things hidden from the public behind privacy settings. If Facebook remains popular, however, it will eventually aggressively purge the profiles of the dead to focus resources on more lucrative monetization opportunities of active consumers.
Honestly, if somehow enough people actually manage to get mad enough at Facebook for it to potentially affect their bottom line, they would likely use Zuckerberg as a scapegoat and ditch him. People like to latch onto a single individual as the problem, so that stunt would probably placate a lot of people [2].
[0]: Even this seems very unlikely given how many deep ties they have into peoples' lives. Keep in mind that it is far from just a social networking tool or blogging platform.
[1]: Hell, they probably have enough money and blackmail data to do whatever they want. Including blackmail.
[2]: Witch hunts are more popular than ever :)
IIRC, Zuckerberg has a controlling stake in Facebook through supervoting shares, so he's not getting ditched unless he wants to be ditched.
I believe he can be removed from his executive role by a court if he's found guilty of a crime (which I believe is likely in the next few years).
I'm not sure about his ownership of the company, but I think a court could order him to transfer supervoting shares as part of a penalty.
But then that begs the question of whether the human individual, Mark Zuckerberg, still owns those shares. They may be in some kind of trust that he can never lose control over.
Celebrity tweets aside, people generally make that sweeping overestimation about the permanence (or at least the public discoverability of) such stuff; as for Facebook itself, users have deleted tons of photos and even their own entire profiles, and typically it's the most interesting (juicy) stuff, e.g. when a girl is going through college and deletes slutty and mischievous pictures of herself from earlier years and parties and relationships.
(Side-note: you spelled "loses" as "looses," one of the most common spelling mistakes.)
I frequent my local Goodwill, once a week. In the book section, there are always multiple school yearbooks. High school, university, middle school. Some very old (university in the 20's). I always take one on my way out. I like looking at the messages people wrote on the inside, and their signature, and then find their yearbook portrait to see what they looked like and what activities they did.
I don't know why this gives me pleasure, but it does for some reason.
What do I do with this growing pile of stranger's yearbooks in my closet? Well, that's a problem I'l deal with eventually...
That's odd. I see it brought up on HN quite frequently. And, frankly, I feel like the implicit tone is always that this data needs to be preserved to allow for the insights of future historians.
Personally, I sit on the opposite side of that fence. The inquisition of future historians does not hold weight against the privacy and well-being of the now-living.
And to them I say, please don’t judge us too harshly.
People of the future, I wonder what your lives are like. I wonder if you’ve colonized space. I wonder if you’ve entered into other dimensions. I wonder if you can observe into the past. And peer into the future. To be able to guide yourselves into the branch of possible futures that you desire.
It might sound ridiculous but I really do wonder. And I wish the answer was yes and that I got to experience it.
[0]: I'm assuming you can also go the opposite way.
Storage is really, really cheap these days. Cheap enough that you can host Wikipedia and OpenStreetMaps in your garage if you wanted to. And this is before you even get to stuff like Amazon Glacier, for data that you don't know what to do with today, but which might be mineable tomorrow.
I fully expect that any shred of personal information, down to comments, is going to be recorded somewhere. Not necessarily with public access, though, and almost certainly not to the public benefit.
Do you care? What makes you think future generations will care about yours?
In the future, there could be actual history classes where students have to trace their own family and read the words of their ancestors.
We already have so much information about the past that we need historians to curate and organise it, and present us with the interesting and relevant fragments in a coherent fashion; otherwise, we're just drowning in data. It's only going to get worse.
For my history degree I actually read a book on ridiculous medieval history - it was an example of history books done wrong (blended dates together, didn't look at historical context), but it's absolutely out there.
And then there's history, which includes the study of 1913.
And period movies and series and comics and so on...
It's easy to look back in the past and see the errors of our ancestors, but I don't know if there's a precedent for looking back and feeling completely unimpressed and underwhelmed. Which is how I imagine our descendants will feel.
Survivorship bias. We only talk about the interesting things, regardless of whether it was recorded or not. Many decades had absolutely nothing of note[0] happen.
[0]: At least nothing of note to people today.
And our encryption will be so inadequate that everything we want hidden now from governments, et. al. will be readable in the diary sense later.
But I worry that one day they might get lost or destroyed and I wonder if I should scan them all, at least for the sake of having an offsite digital backup for the time being :)
But then there's the retrieval problem. I'm very interested in family history and genealogy. Every journal, every photo from even a couple generations back is like a priceless treasure. 100 years from now? Our great-grandkids' grandkids will have more data on us than they'll know what to do with.
One of my long term projects I'd like to help tackle is to answer the question "How do you summarize a life?". I like to imagine a system similar to Superman's ice castle where you insert a digital artifact from your ancestor and an AI helps you sift through their data.
You don't need to preserve the machine. You just need to be able to emulate it sufficiently close on then-current hardware. The nice thing about this approach is that if it's done right, then it scales more or less indefinitely, since you can run emulators inside other emulators. So long as at any given point we have one that covers the previous generation...
This takes care of file formats and software. Maintaining compatibility with the physical medium on which data is archived is trickier, because you can't emulate the reader. But on the other hand, with digital data, you can just copy it over to the new medium. So, again, as long as the archives are regularly updated to keep up with the tech - not even current, just whatever is still available - we're good.
But with the current rate at which we are becoming more and more concerned about our privacy, maybe we won't be in a situation where a site like Facebook can actually 'publish' the diaries.
So possibly this information will remain forever locked-up, until some law forces us to delete this data, and it will be gone forever.
This highlights the biggest difference. Many of the diaries of olden days were written as relatively accurate depictions of actual events. Facebook "diaries" however are the exact opposite. They describe the life that person wished they had.
While you may be able to extract useful information about society overall from this data 100 years from now, it will certainly not say much about an individual's life and those intimate glimpses you would expect.