Countless firsthand accounts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have disappeared across the last decade, and it may speak to larger issues with the historical record in the digital age.
Countless firsthand accounts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have disappeared across the last decade, and it may speak to larger issues with the historical record in the digital age.
I see this as a plus. People have a right to be forgotten. The problem nowadays is that companies track you and keep all your data forever and then use it to advertise to you.
At the very least, data collection and preservation should be explicitly opt-in.
If you really want to save something, download it yourself.
The people who live through wars, the people who die in them—soldiers, civilians, refugees—are so often invisible, so often forgotten, I’m afraid I don’t understand who it helps when their testimony disappears.
If you’re concerned about controlling your own data, getting to go back and delete your own posts on a particular website, getting companies to respect your privacy, I can respect that, but this is a situation where the words people consciously chose to share with a public audience were erased without warning, where memorials to loved ones were taken down without notice.
I agree with you that preserving what’s most important to you means taking personal steps to do, but a library’s worth of voices vanished here.
The less direct access we have to history, the harder it becomes to fact check misinformation about the past, or make informed decisions about the future.