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"  On a more or less weekly basis, I find myself rummaging through the photos on my iPhone, trying to delete enough of them that I have free space to take more. Each episode of mass deletion begins with the same assurance to myself: Hey, it&amp;#039;s all right. You&amp;#039;ve got these backed up. Get a few hundred of them off your phone. It&amp;#039;s fine. And inevitably, I can bring myself to cut maybe 50 out of a couple thousand before giving up on the project until the next week. Deleting photos hurts. I don&amp;#039;t mean getting rid of those inexplicable food snapshots or jokey pics of signs with incorrect grammar. I mean you and your girlfriend on the Golden Gate Bridge. Your friends at that old apartment you never should&amp;#039;ve given up. Your ridiculous kids. Even if you&amp;#039;ve been a good digital denizen and backed up photos on both your hard drive and the cloud, deleting them from your device brings an unpleasant pang, one that&amp;#039;s rooted in something deeper than losing the ability to see a two-year-old picture of yourself at a moment&amp;#039;s notice. Who wants to tap &amp;quot;delete&amp;quot; on their own life story? Which is yet another reason why you&amp;#039;ll never leave Facebook. Facebook owns your nostalgia. If you needed another reminder, you got one this week as The Social Network celebrated its 10th anniversary. Your news feed is probably flooded with &amp;quot;A Look Back&amp;quot; videos, which the company created to mark the occasion. The service auto-generates a minute-long video from a person&amp;#039;s profile data, reminding them when they joined and displaying a collage of old photos and status updates set to the kind of schlocky piano music you might expect from a tech ad or Upworthy video. It&amp;#039;s cute, though a little disjointed if, like me, you tend to upload not just selfies and vacation photos but also news and random images that don&amp;#039;t feel like they belong in a scrapbook. The most alarming feature for some users might be the opening reminder of just how long they&amp;#039;ve been on Facebook. But there&amp;#039;s a big reason more people don&amp;#039;t leave, beyond the fear of losing connection (let&amp;#039;s face it, you could network with those people another way if you really wanted to). Facebook is right about the point it&amp;#039;s trying to drive home: You have so much history that is now inescapably intertwined with this company. It&amp;#039;s not just that they have your photos. It&amp;#039;s that this network of interactions, including likes, messages, and events, can&amp;#039;t be separated from the Facebook ecosystem. So much of your life happens on Facebook that Facebook is the only way to remember it. (Unless you&amp;#039;re one of the too-cool-for-Facebook crowd, in which case... I suppose Snapchat doesn&amp;#039;t create this problem.) Your tweets are going into the Library of Congress. But quit Facebook now and that convenient log of years of your history is just gone. (To you, anyway. Facebook is keeping your data.) Quitting would feel like deleting all the photos from your phone. Those things still happened, but in the ephemera of memory: Without the exact time, location, and comment compliments from your friends, available anytime you want to feel that feeling again. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/web/a10163/a-look-back-is-facebooks-way-of-saying-we-own-your-nostalgia-16460847/>