Why trust Facebook with our history?

Scott Rosenberg discusses the digital records we leave of our day-to-day existence, and wonders why anyone would entrust them to Facebook. It’s a good question. Many of us don’t have the zeal of a Gordon Bell when it comes to monitoring and recording our lives. But we’re recording big sections all the same, with our conversations, updates and photos.

Scott Rosenberg discusses the digital records we leave of our day-to-day existence, and wonders why anyone would entrust them to Facebook. It’s a good question. Many of us don’t have the zeal of a Gordon Bell when it comes to monitoring and recording our lives. But we’re recording big sections all the same, with our conversations, updates and photos. If that trove occurs on Facebook, how do we get our hands on it 10, 20 or 30 years from now?

You could ask the same question about many Web-based services, including e-mail accounts and photo services on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. But I find my stuff lodged with those companies easier to search and retrieve. (The key, as Bell will tell you, is being able to search it, because the bits of data we’re dying to find will be buried under mountains of stored junk.)

Facebook, though, will likely have a richer stream of data describing our lives, especially if its new …quot;places…quot; app takes off. It would seem to me that Facebook could build a niche business offering to archive personal datastreams for premium customers.