SARA ROBINSON
album. Many of the pictures on my account have long since been wiped from my camera roll. So it has proper sentimental value for me, that little mosaic of quotidian smartphone shots. It’s a record of the past decade of my life and I kind of miss knowing it’s there.
As a result, I have a newfound empathy for the avian owners of nests illegally occupied by those pesky cuckoos. Because having someone move into your space sucks, even if that space only exists in the cloud somewhere.
I should have learned my lesson by now because this isn’t my first “disappearing data” rodeo. No, sirree.
Let me bore you with the sorry tale. Back in the prehistoric tech days of the iPod with the turny wheel thing, I invested a lot of time into “ripping” (why so violent?) all my CDs into iTunes before transferring the MP3 files on to my iPod. To give you an idea of the gargantuan nature of the task, I’m a former music journalist, so I had a sizeable record collection. Unsurprisingly, it took a ridiculous amount of time uploading all that music into my jukebox-in-your-pocket. Still, I soldiered on, blinded by the novelty of the sparkly new technology.
Of course, over time, I used CDs less and less until, eventually, I wondered why I bothered holding on to them at all. I mean, they took up so much space. And it didn’t make sense when I could fit thousands of albums into one pocketsized device. So off my CDs went to the charity shop, blue Ikea bag after blue Ikea bag of a lifetime of musical memories. I didn’t look back for years, loving all my newfound storage space. Until the fateful day a considerable chunk of my music library just disappeared from the cloud, where slick Apple marketing had hoodwinked me into storing my many gigabytes of MP3 files.
One day they were there, the next gone, never to be recovered. Despite many frantic calls to the so-called “Genius” (I’ll be the judge of that, thank you) Bar, the files were declared officially missing. Kapow. No more. All those treasured records I’d once owned, now consigned to the great data sinkhole in the sky.
And that’s the thing, isn’t it? The more we entrust to the cloud, to binary code, the less secure those things become. They are no longer things we can touch, feel and smell (if you’re that way inclined). They then belong in the cloud or a server that belongs to a faceless corporation somewhere. They become ephemeral, transient, gossamer bytes you can never grasp between your fingers. And, from there, they are easily lost for good, as I’ve been reminded again this week.
When you upload all your data somewhere and hold on to nothing physical, there are no photo albums or record collections to pass down or peruse over a cup of tea. Mind you, when I tried explaining my sadness at this to my teenage son, he looked at me as if I was explaining quantum physics to him for the first time. Or the concept of, say, “rent”.
So – valuable public service klaxon – please learn from my mistake this week. No matter how secure you *think* the passwords to your favourite apps and online services are, change them. If you value what you store there and the digital world you have created within and around them, then make it difficult for wrong ’uns to get in.
Although, a few days into the hostile takeover of my Insta account, I’m kind of enjoying the enforced break from motivational memes and snaps of over-styled dinners.
Like I said, every cloud...
@sararobinson81