Honestly, I am OK with an ephemeral Internet. I physically clean house yearly and aim to discard or donate anything I didn't need, use, or look at in the past year, and I really wouldn't mind if that happened to my digital "stuff" too. 99.99% of the code I develop, the pictures and video I take, the HN posts I write, nobody is going to look at after a week or so, including me. Pick a random year in the past, go to your phone's photos, and pick a random photo from that year. I bet this is the first time you've ever looked at it since you took the picture. I know it would be the case for me. There might be a handful of family photos and stuff I consider sentimental, but not even enough to fill a shoebox let alone a cloud storage provider.
Moreover, with the amount of intrusive data mining going on, it would be better for all of our privacy if our content just expired regularly.
Moreover, with the amount of intrusive data mining going on, it would be better for all of our privacy if our content just expired regularly.