Black Box Internet : Disposal

According to Wikipedia, “a black box is a device, system or object which can be viewed in terms of its inputs and outputs without any knowledge of its internal workings.”

In Maciej Cegłowski talk “The Internet With A Human Face”, he categorized big collections of personal data as “radioactive waste” after explaining about the ridiculous amount of efforts, time and money required to destroy and erase each of them completely. He called out human hubris and fear for being the driving force behinds the efforts to collect and generate such collections.

I found it interesting that I never, in the past, have thought about the disposal process of my personal data. Filling out forms to sign up for services, putting my personal data on Facebook, uploading photos to Instagram have already seamlessly integrated into my daily life, yet I have no idea about what will happen to my personal data when, for example, Facebook and Instagram falls apart. It’s scary that I’m not able to track down any of the paths my personal data have taken since I began using the internet (roughly when I was 5, through a modem).

If I were given the question “explain what happens when you type in “apple” in the google search bar”, I can roughly explain how it works from the lowest level to the most abstract level including concepts like network protocols, wireless protocols, http requests, APIs, databases and so on. (Look Here for more details).

Nonetheless, the process of disposal and destruction of data is utterly black-box to me. I want to know more about data disposal on the internet, including but not limited to the relevant laws, policies, history, technologies, stories, art, and etc.