Digital Storage on Internet Is Not Absolutely Safe

Digital Storage on Internet Is Not Absolutely Safe ….

In case you feel that whatever you have created or stored on internet , you are living in fools paradise. It may well be time to hit the panic button. 

You will be surprised to know that the things keep on vanishing from the internet, to be forgotten forever. There’s no accountability, no culpability; very often,there’s no record of their existence even.

The Mint reports that last month, Google announced wiping out accounts that have been inactive for two years in the coming months. If you haven’t had any activity on your account for a while, it will be killed, starting December this year.

Google isn’t only the email account where you ping-pong “gentle reminders” back and forth till one person drops dead of inertia. It’s your everything account. Photos, YouTube, address book, travel map, this site, that app—all of it. It could all be junked owing to a policy change.

This announcement led to fevered speculation that YouTube, part of the Google family, could be hit too. YouTube exists today as a digital library housing what may as well be called vintage art. Live videos of famous and un-famous music concerts shot on handheld videotape- cameras from the past decades. Films, TV shows, iconic advertisements—all in a trembling, comically retro video resolution. Conspiracy theory videos of the 1990s-2000s. Banned material. Bootleg albums long out of circulation, surviving as a living entity only on the seventh page of a YouTube search. There was a very real fear that these remnants of a forgotten analogue era could disappear. Mercifully, Google soon clarified that “we do not have plans to delete accounts with YouTube videos at this time”. Read carefully At...this...time.

If Google decided can Twitter be far behind - Google’s decision came a few weeks after Elon Musk announced that Twitter would purge inactive accounts. Twitter has, for better or worse, cemented its position over the past decade as the primary platform for breaking news and analysis. It is the world’s public town square. So even though he has claimed that the accounts will be archived, there’s still a risk that the legacy content residing on Twitter’s pages

will be washed away.

So Google as well as Twitter’s ’s decision is alarming, for it ties into a worrying pattern. Big chunks of our cultural history are being erased. By malice and incompetence both, the transience of the internet is being exploited such that valuable art, essential community material, is disappearing as we speak. Iconic cultural moments, immortal works of art and public service meant to be studied and built upon for decades, now lie at the mercy of tech moguls and their whims.

Another thing, now  personal data is digitally stored in the Digital lockers of various government sites , we trust that every effort is made to secure this data but who knows if any security breach is there and extra smart hacker cracked/ hacked  the digital lockers , what will happen to your data. 

So the best option is to keep physical backup of all your valuable data. Storage on internet is definitely safe, easy to browse and easy to retrieve but it has its own challenges.