[jameson]

Exactly.

The problem with photo since the birth of social media is that it's permanently stored in the internet, literally.

Photos used to be personal and (mostly) temporary. I may take a photo in public, develop, then share with the close ones and store in the photo book. Photo may be somehow passed onto others but likely thrown away eventually when I become less of importance to them, and it'll worn out.

With photos now uploaded to social media or the "cloud", they exist permanently as a means of backups, sold to 3rd party (knowingly or unknowingly) analyzed to "improve the experience of the platform".

[drdaeman]

That permanence is a bit of a myth. Bit rot is as real as physical one. At least four cloud storages (Bitcasa, hubiC, Ubuntu One, Cyphertite) I’ve used in the past are gone.

[jameson]

I want to emphasize "unknowingly" part. Once data is uploaded to an entity, there's no guarantee they'll manage is properly.

User agreements change constantly, engineers make mistake, firms get liquidated and data might get sold, and most importantly, as a former employee of social media firms, what the firms say about the user privacy publicly is very different inside.

[hootz]

But it has potential to be permanent through the means of other people storing copies of it. If you send a photo via WhatsApp to someone, for example, that photo is by default saved automatically to their phone, and potentially synced to their Google Photos.