We are giving our gold away with the sand and pebbles as we watch the breadcrumbs of our digital lives float down the river of life. We need a sieve and nets that we control. Who cares what they do. Clearly it’s not illegal and the shareholders seem happy, if fickle. What those folks do does not concern me. What you do does. You have already given it all away, take some back for yourself. For your future. What I wonder at is how much of the ephemeral stuff that we take for granted is gold dust? And how many nuggets of truth and love shared between those we care are never preserved? Take a guess, how much space does your digital life online take up? 50GB? 250? They are giving 50GB away if you just sign up with new shiney services that solve all the problems you ever could have in this modern age. (Oddly these shiney things never do everything and that in turn brings in new problems that only newer, shinier niche services can help fix.) I say, ‘keep your gold.’ Pass it on. It’s value will compound exponentially down the road. The marketing companies of today don’t care what happens to it once they have a copy of it. And that’s the thing; we stop thinking about it there. Sure, dome of us bitch and moan, some of us wonder what the big deal is and some of us just wonder what privacy really means. Once the marketing companies have it, we assume that we have lost it. And this is far from the truth. When we live in a world where everything is just a copy of a copy of a copy. We may as well grab one for ourselves. We can get a copies if we try hard enough. Better companies offer a way to get most if what they collect back from them. And the others, if you are willing to roll your sleeves up and apply some elbow grease to scraping the ones who are not so polite you can get what’s important to you. What we need is an engine that learns to follow us around and keeps us honest with ourselves. Later on, it can help grandchildren with that family history report. This is the other, integral part of the tool. One has to have ways to get personal value out of it. Easily explore and make connections between disparate parts of ones life. And family history reports for thousands of generations. That historian spider and it web if archives is bundled as part of the service and software updates. You use the tools and get it for your self, keep it safe your self and trust it to the next gen when it’s time to go.
