For most of 2018, I have been hellbent on minimizing the amount of crap I have sitting around on the Internet. I don't mind so much when it is something I created, worked on, or participated in. However, lots of what we do every day is easily forgotten. Internet companies should make it easy to do the same with old data.
Just by existing, I generate enormous amounts of stored data on Google. That company is the equivalent to the inverse of a firehose sucking up just about every minute detail they can. At least they seem, or at least have always seemed in the past, to be forthright allowing one to delete it all. Of course getting to some of it is a real chore.
Earlier this spring I decided that I'd no longer keep more than fourteen years of old email on their servers. Think about it, old email conversations deserve the same fading memory as humans possess. For a while, I was determined to keep just one year of email data. However, my new email at ProtonMail has all that I really need and it only stretches back to April. So today I completely deleted all email in my account. Did I back up any of it? Why? It was just email.
My thoughts on Internet privacy have matured since this blog entry from May 24, 2004.