Your Memories. Their Cloud.

Recently, my iPhone served me “Waterfalls over the years,” which, as promised, featured a slide show with instrumental music and photos of myself and others in front of a random assortment of waterfalls. Like the British war office during World War II, the technology saw the backdrop as the star of the show.

“I don’t think we can simply rely on the algorithms to help you decide what’s important or not,” Mr. Clark said. “There need to be points of human intervention and judgment involved.”

Paring It Down

Rather than just keeping a full digital copy of everything, I decided to take the archivists’ advice and pare it down somewhat, a process the professionals call appraisal. An easy place to start was the screenshots: the QR codes for flights long ago boarded, privacy agreements I had to click to use an app, emails that were best forwarded to my husband via text and a message from Words With Friends that “nutjob” was not an acceptable word.

There were some clear keepers, a selfie I took in Beijing with the artist Ai Weiwei in April 2015; a video of my eldest daughter’s first steps in December 2017; and a shot of me on a camel in front of the Giza Pyramids in 2007, a photo I had purposely staged to recreate one we had on my childhood fridge of my great-grandmother in the same place doing the same thing, but with a disgruntled expression on her face.

Then there’s the stuff I’m ambivalent about, like the many photos with long-ago exes, which for now I’ll continue to hoard given that I’m still on good terms with them and I’m not going to fill up 12 terabytes any time soon.

There was also a lot of “data exhaust,” as the security technologist Matt Mitchell calls it, a polite term for the record of my life rendered in Google searches, from a 2011 query for karaoke bars in Washington, D.C., to a more recent search for the closest Chuck E. Cheese. I will not keep those on my personal hard drive, and I may take the step of deleting them from Google’s servers, which the company makes possible, because their embarrassment potential is higher than their archival value. Mr. Mitchell said super hoarders should pare down, not to make memories easier to find, but to eliminate data that could come back to bite them.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/technology/cloud-data-storage-google-apple-meta.html