Database Reference
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space to house data. This practice, what has been dubbed the creation of
“wildcat electrical utilities,” has led to more calls for government regula-
tion of the cloud (Glanz 2013).
In addition to these concerns, there is the issue of data preserva-
tion. Absent some form of regulation or mutual agreement within the
IT industry, and speciically among those who are major cloud-services
providers, there is no requirement to preserve the photos, email, videos,
postings, data, and iles that individuals and organizations believe are
securely stored in data centers around the world. As a result, much of the
digital evidence from the daily lives of individuals and the decisions and
activities of organizations will vaporize, irrespective of how many cloud
data centers ill the world. As one concerned tech writer argued, “We're
really good at making things faster, smaller, and cheaper. And every step
along the way makes for great headlines. But we're not nearly so good at
migrating our digital stuff from one generation of tech to the next. And
we're horrible at coming up with business models that assure its longevity
and continuity” (Udell 2012). Another person who has been active in
the online world for years, hosting numerous sites and archives, worried,
“Not to be dramatic or anything, but no more than forty days after I die,
and probably much sooner, all the content I am hosting will disappear”
(Winer, quoted in ibid.). To date, the only reason most of this material
has been preserved is due to the heroic efforts of individuals who person-
ally port archives when technology and standards change. Referring to
several archives dating from the turn of this century, Udell commented
in a Wired column, “If I hadn't migrated them, they'd already be gone.
Not because somebody died, it's just that businesses turned over or lost
interest and the bits fell off the web. Getting published, it turns out, is
a lousy way to stay published. With all due respect to wired.com, I'll be
amazed if this column survives to 2022 without my intervention” (ibid.).
There are some efforts, primarily by governments, to archive and preserve
iles. The most notable of these may be at the U.S. Library of Congress,
which, among other things, is archiving the massive database of Twitter
postings. These are all important activities, but they are isolated and much
more data disappears than is preserved. Of course, one can argue, there is
a great deal of digital content that is not worth paying to preserve. Soci-
ety has survived in the past without carrying forward from generation to
generation the entire weight of the historical record. Nevertheless, since
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