Data Evaporation and the Security of Online Identities
Disappearing Data What happens to our data when we are gone? What happens to us, when our data is gone? Does any of this missing data make us vulnerable? These questions that once seemed theoretical are increasingly relevant to our everyday lives. The consequences include not only the potential for lost communications, but also lost data in cloud services, and risk for security breaches for individuals and businesses alike. We all understand that data deteriorates along with the physical media it is stored on–photographs fade and hard disks crash. This is why we have backups, or at least should have them. The problem is, unfortunately, not so simple these days as much of our data in the cloud depends on multiple systems and services acting in concert to exist. This means that data may disappear for reasons independent of the physical media, even with backups and replication. ...