Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Long Will the Internet Remember Us?
An anonymous reader writes "The common trope these days is that the internet never forgets. We tech-inclined folk warn our friends and relatives that anything embarrassing they put on the internet will stay there whether they want it to or not. But at the same time, we're told about massive amounts of data being lost as storage services go out of business or as the media it's stored on degrades and fails. There are organizations like the Internet Archive putting a huge amount of effort into saving everything that can be saved, and they're not getting all of it. My question is this: how long can we reasonably expect the internet to remember us? Assume, of course, that we're not doing anything particularly famous or notable — just normal people leading normal lives. Will our great-grandkids be able to trace our online presence? Will all your publicly-posted photos be viewable in 50 years, or just the one of you tripping over a sheep and falling into the mud?"
Jon Postel. His name doesn't come up all that frequently but I still remember. Martin Manley. You remember that guy? I do, even if Yahoo pulled his website down.
Come on, the internet remembers forever. You die twice, once when you stop breathing, and once when the last person mentions your name.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
The Internet will remember you as long as the services that have information about you exist. The services... they'll remember you as long as their owners can make money off them one way or another. As soon as they can't make money (even if it's just milking venture capitalists for another round of financing), they'll shut the servers down and wipe the databases. A couple months after that, the search engine caches will have lost track of the pages and that'll be that. All that'll be left is what individuals have saved somewhere else, and that's disorganized enough that it probably won't turn up anywhere.
The issue for most people isn't whether the Internet remembers you, or for how long. It's that how long it remembers you is completely and utterly out of your control.
We're all dead anyway. None of my old files are particularly accessible, from code written as a teenager and saved to worn-out floppy disks to CDs formatted for dead operating systems. Most of my photos are rotting on hard drives and I never really bother to look at them.
I don't want to be remembered by "the Internet". I want to be remembered by my kids and grandkids, and maybe some future programmer who might run across some old code I wrote and go "whoa, nice."
The internet can suck a bag of dicks and charge 5.99 a month to watch.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Web Rings on the shoulders of AngelFire. I watched animated GIFs glitter in the dark profiles on MySpace. All those... upvotes... will be lost in time, like memes... on... 4chan. Time... to die...
Nothing lasts forever. Move on.
..as they have figure out how to properly monetize them - till then, they will collect, and wait, collect, and wait..
The internet has selective retention, and things do disappear. It is still possible, last time I checked, to pull up some usenet posts that I made in the mid 90s. At one time Google was able to pull up certain information about me, but that disappeared 10 years ago. On the other hand, lots of things people posted online in information services like GEnie, CompuServe, The Source, etc., never made it onto the internet. Also, many of the old internet archives, ftp sites, gopher sites, archie sites, etc., are rapidly disappearing. I used to spend a certain amount of time spelunking, looking for various types of old information, and a lot of it has disappeared. Some professor leaves and his site and papers eventually tend to go away either by plan, accident, or negligence. A university reorganizes its web site, and old files and personal information goes away. Even on Slashdot it can be hard to find posts I made years ago. For years prior to getting an account I used to post from time to time, and I can find a couple of the posts I remember, but there is one I'd really like to find, and just can't. It seems to have faded into the ether.
You see the same thing happen with blogs and personal web sites. They tends to hand around for a time, sometimes a very long time. But if you change to another service, or lose interest, your stuff eventually tends to disappear for all sorts of reasons. In some cases that can mean a real loss of useful information given the growing important of blogs.
I think the fading memory of the internet is actually a problem. It often seems that for every bit of information that makes it onto the internet there is some fraction of other information that fades away. That would be great if the only problems we faced were new ones, but we keep having to fight the same old battles again and again. Sometimes the old documentation that had faded into irrelevance becomes very timely again, and the old techniques beat the new ones under the changed conditions. That is assuming you can find the documentation to make them work.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Your story will be available as:
1) Standard edition: all your communicated information
2) Gold edition: Standard + incompleted post, emails, etc
3) Platinum edition: Gold + Analytics of your online life
Inherited accounts will be a violation of the copyright.
Somebody discovered my name, unlisted phonenumber and address 10 years after it was posted and then deleted. Google had some historic cache day and it came up again. The thing is that it was a men seeking men site that I never knew existed and I certainly didn't write it myself.
Nobody replied, but I did get a single reply from a similar "advertise" on another site. This was around the time that I suddenly got 100+ emails/day. I had one suspect for it, but couldn't prove it. He was however kicked out of school for using school computers to DDoS. I wasn't signed up for more mailinglists or anything after he left. Go figure.
This mean the internet remembers at least 10 years even if the text on the site is deleted long before those 10 years expire and this memory about you includes what other people write about you without your knowledge and/or consent.
forever.
Signature intentionally left blank.
Put something funny/quirky/stupid on your IRL headstone, the internet will then rediscover you over and over until the words can't be read.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
It'll be the first data jubilee.
The mormons have been saving everyones name &DOB for years. Unless you have done something really really good - no chance.
Of course if we are not off this planet in 10 billion year we (the human race) is dead anyway.
Well taking into account the rate of capacity increase it could be around for a very long time look back to the 60's. The best back then was 100-300mb less than a CD and look at now "HGST announces a helium-filled 6 TB drive"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox
When my university's library expanded in the late 1980s, I wondered about two things: in another two or three decades, will they need to expand again? Of course. And also: Who is going to read or look up info in all those books? Of course, there will always be specialists and indexes and catalogs, but if the trend continues for all the 21st Century, and all of the 22nd Century, ..., at some point there will be far too much "literature" even in a very narrow academic specialty for any human to make use of. Then what about all the non-academic stuff, cheap romance novels and mysteries and memoirs of flash-in-the-pan pseudo-celebrities?
It's not that we need a good ol' roaring book-burning now and then like at Alexandria long ago, but somehow the best needs to be brought to the top, and the most of the mediocre disposed of. And maybe keep mediocre writers from ever starting. (Stuff that's actually *bad* not merely mediocre - keep some as examples and for the entertainment value!)
So now we have disks and all manner of extremely dense storage materials. This changes nothing, aside from the physical space requirements are reduced to near nothing. Even with intelligent indexes and indexes of indexes, or miraculously good search engines such as Google, or whatever we'll have in fifty years - it's mind-boggling to wonder how such a huge growing pile of information will be utilized.
The Internet is not a Sentient Being. It doesn't live nor breathe, nor is it a set of tubes. It doesn't "remember" anything. The systems that we associate with the Internet, like Search Engines or Storage Services all have Terms of Service (ToS) that have a wide range of rights and responsibilities that are legally binding. Since you had no dealings with the authoring of the ToS for any particular service you use, you're basically agreeing to allow them to do whatever they want with whatever you're willing to use of their services. Think Human Centi-I-Pad here folks.
If you don't want to be "remembered" by the Internet there's really not a way to eliminate your information. Sure there are companies out there who'll clean up your image or try to, for a fee but in the US at least these companies can be as predatory with what you allow them to have because you allow them to do it to you. It's in the ToS you agreed to and they'll sell the information to other companies who will then create new profiles about what kind of cereal you eat or what medications you take. The downstream market on data mining personal preferences and choices is huge and even your state and local governments sell your data to middle-men data brokers all the time. Buy a new car recently? Your information, what you bought, how much you payed is all out there. So now not only is that transaction disclosed to somebody else it's used outside of that transaction to determine your eligibility to buy or possibly buy other things. You bought a VW, that must mean you fit into this box and your address is here so your income level must be this... You're now filed and categorized and your junk mail will now reflect the new influx of great marketing material targeted to that box.
What's been lacking is a complete lack of legislation protecting your privacy and keeping your private information private. The problem with is legislators are constantly glad-handed by the same companies who mine your data constantly and they constantly lobby them prohibiting progress in protecting you. In the US the Supreme Court has even ruled that you have no expectation of privacy when you hand data over to a third party. Until this is rectified, you're screwed.
On the flip side should you choose to deal with a company who provides their service via the Internet, I wouldn't rely on a company that offers something for free because at the root of this is how sustainable is that model? If it's "free" there's usually a hook and whatever you entrust to them will usually be subject to some change in that ToS in the future. If you pay for a service, you should make sure that the business has a sustainable business model and will grow. I mean you wouldn't put your money in a bank that just popped up and is operating out of the trunk of a car would you? No you wouldn't, but there are people who constantly trust their photos, files and other personal data to droves of Internet "startups" who will be gone or have such rotten infrastructure that whatever you give them will either disapper or be stolen. Of course you can hope that they get acquired but usually in that case, it means that whatever you have will be discontinued or substantially changed by a new ToS that again, you have no input on. You either agree or disagree.
I tell my family and friends that it's not the Internet, it's the companies providing these services. If you trust these companies fine but then I say "Would you let them hold your wallet for a week?" "Would you let Larry Ellison watch your small child while you run and do an errand?" If not why would you then entrust your vacation photos or that huge collection of old Jazz MP3s you have to them? Sure, there are services that add value but again what's the business model and are you in control of what they do with the information you give them? In most cases, that's not true and those are the services you should avoid.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Forever and not a second longer than it has to. If your dirty secrets are around, but nobody cares to look - does it make a sound?
Theres http://www.archiveteam.org/ a collective effort to save web sites, i am downloading Geocities in a torrent http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Geocities just to recover two crap pages i did long time ago, its like watching photos 20 years old :)
When I am a multi-billionaire, I will build a giant monument, 100 miles wide, fifty tall, and engrave on it all over every tweet and facebook post ever written since the 1990s, through all of the 21st century, so our descendants one thousand years in the future will not lose all that precious wisdom and insight into our culture.
the internet will remember you as long as the sum of your online life is valued >= $0.01
...or as long as the sum of your online life is valued >= 0.00000001 BTC (whichever comes last)
Your picture would not be on the Internet for 50 years I uploaded a picture of myself in the 80s in a gift format swing in my cock around and around and posted it on a BBS, in Japan it become very popular so I saved a copy it has faded so much that you cannot even see what I am swinging around It is gradually over the years become darker and darker. I was younger then obviously and I really looked the business if I do say so myself. People used to be more isolated on the Internet in those days and they needed titillation and friendship homos used to have their accounts deleted in those days if you remember even by the fashionable crowd like virgin in 1996. it all changed when the U.S. mob with their self hosting and getting somebody to volunteer to expose themselves to somebody in the USSR and China Philippines and so on. The only records I can find of me on the Internet these days is when I branded SUSE shit-Suse for putting a U.S. flag on regional KDE regardless of what country they come from.
Since before Internet was Internet I have been online, but unlike many others, I rather have my real identity to remain inconspicuous.
Why should I let Internet to "remember" me ?
I mean, what for ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
...as long as it damn well pleases.
This info will only survive as long as our current modern advanced civilization. If, for whatever reason, civilization got knocked back to 19th century levels or earlier then it would all be gone. Whether the cause is a comet impact to the earth or chaos related to global warming, glacial melting and inundation of coastal cities or just another damn big volcano like in 535 AD.
We still know of famous authors who wrote hundreds of books, but none of their books exist to this day. They were burned in the sacking of Alexandria or the volcano which destroyed Herculaneum. Or just used as fuel by the peasants struggling to survive after the fall of Rome or Athens or Constantinople or whatever.
There is no guarantee about the future. But at the same time, how many of you have read the debates in parliament about the health of King George III. I have because they still exist and the library at my university had a full set of Hansard in its collection. But how many people do you think would seek out this kind of old trivia? Same thing goes for the vast Internet archives wherever they may be. At some point, if not already, Google's search algorithm will make a lot of old stuff unfindable unless you do a specific search that includes that stuff. For many people that day is already here because they are logged in to their Google account and Google searches based on their personal interests.
This internet thing is recent and the 'content lasts forever' is a problem of the present generation. Before the turn of the century the stupid shit we did in high school and college would go away unless it generated an official governement record, and someone was inclined to do a deep background check. Now many document every little thing that happens and posts it on services that depend on keeping those records for a long time. No forever, just long enough to be annoying when one is trying to make money or get married. Facebook, tumblr, whoever, will eventually begin to archive, or there will so much new content that old will be harder to find. Even the sex videos will become overwhelmed with the new content. Memory is not just existence, but
establishing a navigable path to the content. Such a path will still have costs, and if we are not famous that cost will less liley be borne by the random stanger
Let me give you a benign example. For years I had a press photon online as part of minor research project. It was posted in the mid 90's, at the beginning of this internet thing, and would be what would pop up if anyone was looking for me. After a time, 10-15 years, it simply disappeared. from a casual search. I am sure that if one dug it is somewhere online. I am sure if one dug it is a newspaper or a hard drive. But who is going to do so? Not me, not anyone I could imagine.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
More importantly: Do we want to?
Forgetting is a benefit. We all have things in our lives we do not want to remember, or want to remember differently than they truly were. That perfect holiday you had, the love of your life, how you met your wife, etc.
In many relationships and friendships, selective memory is what keeps them together. Remembering the good times and forgetting the troubles.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
the internet doesn't remember me even now, and I've been using it since 1995...
Will our great-grandkids be able to trace our online presence?
Yes. They will have access to deanonymized archives that will include things you thought couldn't be connected to you and there'll probably be a top-100 most embarrassing facts list. Your data will be cross-indexed automatically with the same care that we now use to preserve important historical artifacts, because humanity's data IS a historical artifact. This will be both economically and technologically feasible. The data is there and it's not expensive to store it forever.
The real question is to what extend non-published data will be included, such as your emails and phone calls. This data is collected and stored, but it's anyone's guess whether that data is in enough hands now that we can be confident that it'll survive long enough to be available in 50 years. E.g. if your US phone calls are only recorded by the NSA and no one else, it all comes down to the particular policies of the NSA, which isn't something we can predict 50 years ahead.
If you publish an encrypted 100-hour 1080p video on the internet now, then that may well not survived forever (you have to encrypt it to defeat someone storing a lower-quality copy), just because it's too big. A 1 kb post on a forum? Why do you think that would ever go be forgotten? Just because you can't find it now doesn't mean it can't be found, and even if it isn't publicly accessible, there are likely still private organizations out there with a complete history of the internet and those archives are what will be the basis for public history in 50-100 years time.
I for one would like the Forum 2000 Hall of Fame to be restored.
Now that I'm divorced, all that relationship advice from Cookie Monster, Ayn Rand, Bill Gates and Hillary Clinton would come in handy.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
I think it better to think about internet longevity in terms of 'half life': a certain amount of the information recorded will decay over a certain amount of time. Few people will ever completely disappear. But that doesn't mean that people beyond a certain point will be easy to find.
I'm pretty sure goatse will live forever. No matter how much eyebleach you use. That's permenant.
Social media data (Facebook, LinkedIn), etc. will always be available. Even UseNet is still available as a 2.1GB download.
but a whimper. (TS Elliot). If data sits in a server, and no one looks for it or accesses it, does it make a noise? I have a warehouse full of used books (recycling collection business). No one is reading them. They exist, though.
Gently reply
I can't find a lot of stuff that used to be there 15 years ago.
if you're looking for it 10 years later, its gone
if you find it a year later and wish it would have been lost forever, it will always be there to remind you
The internet (in particular ancestry.com) will remember you forever, whether you want to be remembered or not. In particular it will remember your name, the day and location you were born, the day and location of your marriage (and the person you married), what children you had (when, where), and the day you died. It'll also remember how you responded to censuses. It'll probably remember one portrait of you, or a group shot. If you have an obituary it might remember that too. I expect soon it will remember your full genome as well, stored extremely compactly a diff of your parent's genomes.
What is the ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything? You already know it: "What is your name?"
Data longevity is a function of need. The more you need it the less time it lasts. The less you need it the longer it lasts.
That drunken self of you and the donkey? Yea, that lasts FOREVER.
The CAD drawing you did of a gearbox ten years ago that you desperately need now? Yea, it disappeared two to four weeks ago.
Anyone who thinks this stuff matters needs to read this poem
until reality sinks through into the brain of the reader.
http://www.online-literature.com/shelley_percy/672/
How has every comment missed the obvious here? As long as storage capacities stay current or increase (as seems incredibly likely) and computing power does likewise (for search concerns), then your Internet Archives and Googles and search engines and media hosts and governments, and blogs even, have no reason to delete anything ever, it will become both cheaper to store/search and a mere fraction of the data they continue to store. If any major service even goes out of business its data will be bought and preserved by another. On the other hand it is obvious that current civilization will end in a matter of decades, barring magic technological discoveries to save us from ourselves (guaranteed collapse from the insane "infinite growth is good" paradigm). I think a far more interesting question is how and what data will last, via physical media and technology issues over the long term, what and how data is intentionally preserved and by whom, and when/who/how it will be attempted to be read/recovered by future civilizations (or aliens if we manage to destroy our planet or race that badly). I did some superficial looking before and I am not sure that we have any sort of capability to reliably store digital data for thousands of years without a refresh, if it should come to that, and there is a lot of gray area in between.
The more embarrassing your activities are, the more likely it is that the Internet will remember you...
ForEVER!!!
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At the present rate of planetary warming, no one will remember humans in a few hundred years anyway.
Which isn't a bad thing; with the rate of Internet traffic, we'll soon have to dispose of it like toxic waste. In clay-lined pits, undisturbed for hundreds of years, until some unfortunate graduate student had to enter the toxic data mines as part of his research into how a botched website actually killed people.
Much from the 80's and 90's is already lost. SERDAR ARGIC, Kibo, and Chalie Spradling.
Oh well, at least Joel Furr and Bonnie Burton are still going strong.
Roger Ebert wrote a poignant essay on this topic about a year before his own death. In the essay, he explores just what information about someone means, divorced from actually knowing that person. Check it out; it's a keeper. Merry Christmas.
Eventually the sky will come down to meet the Earth and they will briefly become one in fire. When the fire dims, there will be nothing but night. Until the night itself fades and then there is nothing. Whether that nothing will last forever is an interesting question.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I think the question is the wrong question to ask. The right question would be for how long we, the data owners, will allow the internet to store more of our data.
With the way things are going there will eventually be, tombstones that have servers, hard-drives, screens not to mention be wi-fi or whatever enabled.
The big question is will there be enough information to create a facimile holoprojection of you, that is sentinent. It would make visiting graveyards a whole new experience.
I would be willing to bet that a lot of what we do will be around forever due to mirroring sites ( some legit, some not so much ). However as your data ages, and more and more data comes out, the older stuff will be virtually invisible as its crushed under the weight of 'current' data.
I have found that even when services go away ( like geocities, which had a lot more content than people realized ) at lot of what was there can still be found, if you search long enough, or know where to go.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
With the help of Google and its ilk, we have an unprecedented capacity to find nearly every needle, and very few things other than needles, in a haystack of arbitrary size.
We're in no position to determine what will be useful far in the future. Preserve it all, and let the Eschaton sort it out.
Then again, I'm a confessed hoarder.
>How long will the internet remember?
The "internet" is not a single, controlled entity. As previous posts have pointed out, it's a cumulative sum of individual services and companies, which each remember/forget and die independently. The formatting of the question indicates submission from a facetweeting derp.
I wouldn't have made that rude accusation if the question had been about corporate lifetimes. Some, particularly dotcoms, are short-lived. For many, however, there's an element of pride when your company is "Est. 1889" and still going. Some will live (and "remember") as far as we can ever predict. Years from now, Disney will write another movie (about a time-travelling highschooler or whatever) that was "inspired" by someone's ancient online bit of writing - Disney's lawyers will be happy to point out that it was on their forum.
I created a Slashdot account for myself, under a fake name way back in 1999 and used to post under it quite prolifically. Around 2005 I pretty much slowed way down and eventually stopped using it entirely. I only ever post A/C anymore. Now and then I try to search for some of my old postings in the archives, and cannot locate most of them, including a really clever alternate-lyrics that I wrote for a popular song that was very funny and drew a lot of attention here. It's gone. Poof. Vanished like a fart in the wind.
A great example, Pantex. You know, the place in Texas that used to make (and now disassembles) nuclear weapons?
They used to have a site that was really cool (not to mention a definite security hazard). Pics of everything, maps marking buildings, explanations of the in depth security measures, approximate counts of pits and weapons onsite along with a map and pics of the magazines they are stored in. Pics of folks working on the weapons themselves. Even pictures of the armored trucks they transport pits and bombs to and from Kirkland AFB and Sandia Labs.
It was very cool.
Try finding that stuff now.
Our species is looking the wrong direction.
This was a subject near and dear to me. When I drove past graveyards and saw all those names engraved in granite above their buried bodies, I realized their intent with the granite. What happened to them, who were they? What did they do? /.com
I composed a biz plan and proceeded for a place to remember all those things I asked, what others will ask about someone gone. Simple plan: Social network based site with advertising profits going to a fund established to perpetuate an income for the online fees and costs. Got hacked and that brought down MarkinHisoty.com. Re-made it and put it back up as EternalPage.org
It floundered. I ran out of funds to keep it online and lost faith as the coding got old and upgrades became too costly.
Bottom line /Answer to the article posted: No one cares about that stuff until its staring them in the face; after they pass 60 or so.