Notes

‘digital natives’ without physical record of memories or important documents or important resources/guides are prone to losing entire lifestyles, entire histories, entire records.

central backups are a thing but are held by fallible institutions
huge losses at the whim of corporations and platforms
better personal backup mechanisms?
- requires non-proprietary data formats
- open-source clones of popular sites are useful for this
providing public decentralised data retrieval?
- eg free/open-source data extractors
- but also, a physical alternative?
  - eg streamlined mechanisms to store e-books on external storage, and/or print them off for archival
  - consider those photo printing booths in eg Boots where you can connect social media
  - this but free, private, public, open-source, etc
  - even could compromise bring-your-own-paper or similar
provision of information in a wider variety of formats can support those with accessibility needs, cross international/political limitations (e.g. communicating with dissident activists of authoritarian states), etc.
Open data is incredibly powerful.

Corporations as non-individuals despite appearing so in law — concerned ultimately with protecting their assets and capital, mostly non-inclusive of the workforce or service users — yet hold a huge amount of knowledge-power, personal info, etc

to the extent that younger generations have a lot more stake in the platforms they use that does not translate to power and autonomy

Entire communities, lifestyles, careers, reputations etc at the whim of mostly oblivious companies

platforms are designed to keep users on and not move their data out.

proprietary data export is shallow

Mentions

“every passport may be seen as a physical interface or an extension of a larger digital database accessible only to immigration officers and state authorities. In this database, the passport expands into a deeper history of departures and arrivals.” ⤴️
“inaccessible archival depth that remains beyond individual control.” ⤴️
“They could now more efficiently extract content from the users’ data sets, which also started offering its users the chance to copy the profile by downloading a zipped file that would seemingly include all the archived information in one’s Facebook profile. As Austrian law student Max Schrems has proved, however, this zipped file is only a fraction of what Facebook really archives. After submitting a request under the European “right to access” law, he made Facebook disclose all the information that the corporation had collected on him. Facebook sent him a CD with a 1,200-page PDF document containing far more substantial data than the generic archive offered for download (which, according to Schrem, amounts to only about 29 percent of the aggregated data).” ⤴️

Links

Notes

proprietary data export is shallow

Mentions