I wonder if twenty years from now, someone will be archiving one of the big email providers.
"In the early 21st century, there existed large cloud 'email' organizations. Here I found a trove of 'hard disks' images from one of the companies, HotMail. I've been digging around and look at these email addresses, it appears this image contains all the 'email' for around 10k users. Here is one where a couple users with the usernames 'joesmith' and 'andreasanchez', engaged in playful romantic flirting. Although by digging further in the emails it appears one of them, 'joesmith' is newly married to 'andreasmith'. Here is thier wedding invitation. Fascinating digital archeology"
Of course that's exactly what will happen. If you put your data in the cloud, it's one day going to be publicly available. If you don't like that, you should consider running private servers for your data.
That's assuming they do not properly destroy their data, which they are legally obligated to do as far as I understand. You could also just encrypt your data before uploading.
It would be nice if we ever got any good privacy legislation for it to include a requirement that a company keep money in a trust to retain services to erase servers with private information of public citizens. That, along with some specific rules about what private information can be collected or retained, might greatly change the economics of the "online free service supported by massive data mining of customers" space, which IMO would be a very good thing.
My understanding is not all cloud providers go through the same great lengths to ensure all data is correctly destroyed, instead of just "Dark" but I sadly don't have any references I can site, just antidotes from people who work in these data centers.
Reminds me of the bit from Cryptonomicon, which as it happens was published in 1999:
> [Randy] has pointed out to Avi, in an encrypted e-mail message, that if every particle of matter in the universe could be used to construct one single cosmic supercomputer, and this computer was put to work trying to break a 4096-bit encryption key, it would take longer than the lifespan of the universe.
> "Using today's technology," Avi shot back, "that is true. But what about quantum computers? And what if new mathematical techniques are developed that can simplify the factoring of large prime numbers?"
> "How long do you want these messages to remain secret?" Randy asked, in his last message before leaving San Francisco. "Five years? Ten years? Twenty-five years?"
> After he got to the hotel this afternoon, Randy decrypted and read Avi's answer. It is still hanging in front of his eyes, like the after image of a strobe:
> I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil.
If you encrypted something in 1999 with 56-bit key DES, you were using a cipher that at that time was not just controversial or considered weak by leading cryptographers (that was already the case in 1977), but also practically demonstrated to be broken.
If anything, the fact that brute-force still seems to be the most practical attack against DES shows that (symmetric) encryption lasts surprisingly long.
Something like a recent episode of The Orville perhaps? Where they find someones phone from the 21st, download all the messages, calls, etc and uses the holodeck to recreate what it might be like.
"In the early 21st century, there existed large cloud 'email' organizations. Here I found a trove of 'hard disks' images from one of the companies, HotMail. I've been digging around and look at these email addresses, it appears this image contains all the 'email' for around 10k users. Here is one where a couple users with the usernames 'joesmith' and 'andreasanchez', engaged in playful romantic flirting. Although by digging further in the emails it appears one of them, 'joesmith' is newly married to 'andreasmith'. Here is thier wedding invitation. Fascinating digital archeology"