- Unsupervised Learning
- Posts
- When Companies Go Out of Business, What Happens to Your Data?
When Companies Go Out of Business, What Happens to Your Data?
Source: When a Company Is Put Up for Sale, in Many Cases, Your Personal Data Is, Too – The New York Times
One of the main things you should be looking for in a Terms of Service agreement, assuming you ever do look, is a description of what happens to the data you’ve given that company if they ever go out of business.
Ask yourself that for Facebook. For Instagram. For Flickr.
For LinkedIn.
The interesting thing is that there’s no consensus really on who’s data it actually is. It’s not yours in most cases, even though the data is about you. In most scenarios, in the U.S. at least, the data is owned by who you give it to.
This is how they’re able to sell it.
It’s the type of thing to make paranoid types want to avoid social networking and use as few websites as possible. But I’m not advocating that. I’m still going to use the stuff, because the benefit is worth more than the risk.
All I’m saying is to pay attention to it.