Makes me a little sad to think of it gradually succumbing to bit rot, even though I know everything does and I don't mind that some of my own data is going the same way. If you want to preserve it I bet it wouldn't be too hard to rustle up volunteers to try to retrieve and transfer it.
They will probably put it in some archive where they delete it after 10 years. Or they keep it somewhere on a drive where it could be accessed but will never be, since no one has a reason to use the data.
Seconded, I'm in the same boat. I realize attempting to wipe my data from all the various sources it may be in across the web is futile but I'd still like to try.
It would be nice if the data could be frozen and archived in some fashion. So much (foolishly) moved onto Facebook, letting it just "die and go away" would be like torching a non-insignificant sampling of historical public records.
They keep that as long as it's useful. At some point they're going to have to start removing old data there as well, but it's probably mostly text and numbers. This is just pure whataboutism. Explain to me how keeping a ton of data forever is in any way realistic? How would you go about doing that?
I'm sure the data is coming in from multiple sources and being stored on high capacity tape archives or something, if it's not just being thrown away at some point after analysis is complete.
We definitely have orphaned data in the mix and are working to purge it. However, most of the data has to be kept in case its needed in the future (however unlikely that may be).
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