This is something that keeps me worried at night. Unlike other historical artefacts like pottery, vellum writing, or stone tablets, information on the Internet can just blink into nonexistence when the server hosting it goes offline. This makes it difficult for future anthropologists who want to study our history and document the different Internet epochs. For my part, I always try to send any news article I see to an archival site (like archive.ph) to help collectively preserve our present so it can still be seen by others in the future.
We need deliberate efforts to archive everything efficiently.
We also need a way to decouple everyone’s personal info from publicly available information about them, keeping in mind that not all publicly available information is intended to be that way.
Storage ain’t cheap and it definitely ain’t infinite.
This is a way harder problem than “the internet” being a bit more mindful can solve easily.
Not to absolve any companies from responsibility or anything.
Here’s a crazy idea, what if the personal information becomes publicly available something like a century or two after their death? How cool would genealogy be if you could go through and know more about these vague people from 2 centuries ago than just “this is bob, he was born on this date, married on this date, had kids on these dates and died on this date. Oh and here’s a single photo that could easily have been misidentified”