If you deactivate Facebook, according to the site, you can reactivate whenever you want. But given Facebook’s track record on both privacy and telling the truth, it’s worth asking if we can really trust them to delete our data when we ask them.įirst, there is a big difference between deactivating Facebook and deleting it. That kind of behavior may seem freeing, a way of telling off a social media site that has lost the trust of many. Now, as scandals sweep through the social media behemoth Facebook, many people are realizing the intimate nature of the personal data Facebook possess a burgeoning #DeleteFacebook movement has everyday users deleting and/or de-activating their accounts. This wealth of information includes every message that has been sent, all contacts in one’s phone, audio messages, even events attended. As a writer for the Guardian explained when he downloaded his Facebook data (something anyone can do) his data download was nearly 600 megabytes - equivalent to nearly 400,000 Word documents.
Experts estimate that there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day at our current pace, a figure that continues to grow. Thanks to social media, the data collected on the most mundane details of daily life is unprecedented. But that won’t be true for future historians: assuming an apocalyptic event does not wipe the internet off this plane of existence, or some sweeping data privacy legislation mandates widespread deletion, humans of the future will know a great deal about us. We only have journals and old photographs to piece together stories. Little is known about the interior lives of regular people who lived centuries ago, mostly because the internet did not exist.
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