Contrary to popular belief, what you put on the internet is not forever.

It can feel like the internet will never fade away when photos of your college exploits resurface in a Google search or when you cringe at what your kids are posting on Instagram. The truth however, is a little more complicated and a lot less permanent.

The digital world wasn’t ever designed with permanence in mind. From the volatility of storage devices to the short-sighted business models that dominate for-profit social media services, our digital world is incredibly fleeting. It was designed to be small, fast and free. Your CDs, DVDs, disk drives, floppy disks, tapes, you name it – they’ll all be unreadable in a generation, some in a decade.

Where does that leave all the stuff you’re tossing into the cloud then? It’s in someone else’s hands, specifically for-profit internet giants with no incentive to keep anything longer than they need to. Your cloud data is for sale, if it even belongs to you anymore at all.

We’ve not only traded privacy and security for convenience, we may have also traded our legacies.

You know that box in your closet full of old family photos; that shelf in your garage with your kids’ trophies; the safe deposit box where you keep family heirlooms? We’ve all got some personal version of that trunk in the attic. But do you know where your digital photos, videos and personal effects are sitting right now? If you do, then you’ve felt the pain and cost of dealing with it. If you don’t, you’re not alone.

We treasure our physical legacies, but we burn through our digital record.

It is expected that your descendants would only find your stuff archived in a museum if you were a prominent historical figure. Yet, as our society continues its steady march from film photography and physical documentation to digital files, we put the power to capture history into everyone’s hands.

We need secure solutions that can preserve the digital legacy of anyone. We need solutions that protect people’s rights to their personal data and don’t sell their legacy for profit.

Permanent.org puts the power of a museum into your hands.

Permanent.org is backed by the Permanent Legacy Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by prolific tech entrepreneur Dean Drako with a mission to provide secure and lasting data storage for all people.

With our endowment model, multiple redundant backups – including a partnership with the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation archivists – data migration and file format conversion process, we are ready to preserve the world’s personal data, entrusted to our system, forever.