[SIGCIS-Members] Google boss warns of 'forgotten century' with email and photos at risk

[Dag Spicer]

Great point Mathew.

Archivists have been dealing with this issue in a systematic way for well over a decade, if not longer.

Here at CHM, we bring up the issue in our “Memory & Storage” gallery in a CHM-produced mini-movie called “The Digital Dark Age.”

See: http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/memory-storage/8/325

I was also interviewed on the topic by BBC this past week.  My basic observation was that people will need to take *personal* responsibility for their data, migrating it to newer storage technologies as they arrive and that relying on a corporate entity to do that has some serious privacy and long-term reliability issues.  Will Google someday try to sell you access to your own data?  It would be naive to assume they are acting upon humanitarian impulses…  the case of Gmail may be instructive: the contents of all emails sent or received by Gmail are scanned by Google to target advertising to you.   What if Google goes out of business?

Such “longue durée” questions are exactly what archivists are philosophically and professionally trained to consider.  Will Google adopt that same perspective?  Is that even possible?

Dag
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On Feb 13, 2015, at 4:47 AM, Matthew Kirschenbaum <mkirschenbaum at gmail.com<mailto:mkirschenbaum at gmail.com>> wrote:

I'm gonna assume this is "news" only because Vint Cerf said it. Rather than the sky is falling, it's too bad he didn't use the occasion to spotlight work that archivists are actually doing.



On Friday, February 13, 2015, Brian Randell <brian.randell at newcastle.ac.uk<mailto:brian.randell at newcastle.ac.uk>> wrote:
Hi:

>From The Guardian:

> Digital material including key historical documents could be lost forever because programs to view them will become defunct, says Vint Serf
>
> Piles of digitised material – from blogs, tweets, pictures and videos, to official documents such as court rulings and emails – may be lost forever because the programs needed to view them will become defunct, Google’s vice-president has warned.
>
> Humanity’s first steps into the digital world could be lost to future historians, Vint Cerf told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in San Jose, California, warning that we faced a “forgotten generation, or even a forgotten century” through what he called “bit rot”, where old computer files become useless junk.
>
> Humanity’s first steps into the digital world could be lost to future historians because the electronic files that describe the story will not run on their computers.
>
> Cerf pushed for the development of “digital vellum” to preserve old software and hardware so that out-of-date files could be recovered no matter how old they are.
>
> “When you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people’s tweets, and all of the world wide web, it’s clear that we stand to lose an awful lot of our history,” he said.
>
> “We don’t want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future,” he added.

<snip>

Full story at:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/google-boss-warns-forgotten-century-email-photos-vint-cerf

Cheers

Brian Randell

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This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org<mailto:members at sigcis.org>, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members