When you think about your legacy, you often consider the possessions you will pass down and the values you will impart to your children and grandchildren. However, in our increasingly digital world, your online presence has become an extension of your identity. Your social media profiles, writings, photos, and other creative works online collectively form your “digital legacy.”
Just as you wish to pass down precious heirlooms to your descendants, you also want to preserve your digital legacy. Whether it’s your travel blogs, self-published stories, or decades of personal journal entries, this data reveals your passions, beliefs, sense of humor and personality. Losing access could erase meaningful parts of your life’s work and what future generations know about you.
Risks of data loss
Before exploring solutions, it helps to understand the fragility of digital information. Email providers, social platforms, and cloud backup services typically access and scan your data. While convenient for you, this third-party accessibility also poses security risks. Servers get hacked, employees abuse privileges, and governments request private records. For example, Iranian hackers once breached Telegram and exposed sensitive user data to the public. Even tech giants like Yahoo suffer massive data breaches. Terms of service for popular platforms also give companies rights to modify, share, or remove content whenever they choose. For instance, Tumblr notoriously banned adult content in 2018 and deleted associated accounts without warning. Reports reveal social media sites frequently take down profiles upon death unless legacy contacts claim them.
how does privnote work? Think about floppy disks that you no longer access historical data from. Outdated file types get lost amid waves of software and hardware innovation. Due to such fragility factors, researchers estimate almost two-thirds of digital data today will vanish within 20 years. Any online content you wish to maintain long-term requires conscious preservation methods outside temporary storage systems. This is where encrypted digital notes shine.
Harnessing encryption
Encryption translates data into secret code that only authorized parties decipher with a decryption key. It has protected sensitive information for centuries, from military secrets to personal credit card numbers. End-to-end encryption that keeps keys solely with the sender and recipient offers the highest level of protection. With encrypted digital notes, you control ultimate access and preservation. Leading options like Joplin, Standard Notes, and Obsidian publish applications with robust encryption protocols built directly into their design, along with many other privacy features.
Preserving your digital legacy
Once embracing encrypted notes apps, you begin consciously archiving anything worth maintaining as your digital legacy, such as:
- Creative works like stories, screenplays, manuscripts, songs, art portfolio galleries, photography collections, etc. that you’ve invested months or years in perfecting.
- Personal journals, diaries, spiritual insights, recipe books passed down through generations, travel guides from adventures around the world, gardening logs tracking seasonal knowledge over decades, and other unique documentation of your life experiences.
- Professional writings including published articles, keynote speeches, consulting reports, intellectual property like patents, academic works like theses, dissertations, and seminal research that advances your field.
- Family records like ancestry exploration findings, genetic data reports, heirloom documentation, photo albums with rich backstories, and videos capturing precious memories across generations.
With strong encryption protocols, you get to dictate exactly who accesses such meaningful digital data both now and centuries down the road, even long after online platforms have failed.
