Your memories. Their Cloud.

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I have many fears as a mother. My kindergarten daughter recently learned a game on the school bus called "Truth or Strength." My youngest refuses to eat almost anything but Kraft Mac and Cheese. Added to the list this year, alongside outside influences and health concerns, is the possibility that my daughters may inadvertently exclude me from my digital life.

I reported their experiences for The New York Times, and while I was talking to these parents, who were stunned and deprived of the loss of their important emails, photos, videos, contacts and documents for decades, I realized that I was also at risk.

I am "complete for the cloud", keeping my most important digital information not on a hard drive at home but in the i huge digital basement provided through the servers of tech companies. Google is giving all users 15 gigabytes for free, a quarter of what's standard on an Android phone, and I haven't managed to max it out in 18 years of using the company's many services.

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I filled up Apple's free 5GB, so I'm now paying $9.99 per month for additional iCloud storage. Meta has no maximum; like scrolling on Instagram, the space allowed is infinite.

If I was suddenly cut off from any of these services, the loss of data would be professionally and personally devastating.

As a kid in the 1980s, I used to have physical constraints on the number of photos, diaries, VHS tapes, and notes past seventh grade that I could reasonably keep. But the huge expanse and relatively cheap rent of the so-called cloud made me a data hoarder. As 2023 approached, I set out to dig through everything I stored on each service and find a place to save it that I had control over. As I struggled with all the gigabytes, my concern shifted from losing it all to figuring out what was actually worth saving.

Data Harvesting

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