Email has been a part of my life for well over nearly thirty years. It's kind of amazing to think of a time back in high school when there weren't electronic communications. That seems foreign now, as we don't have to send physical objects or converse with voice to communicate. The world of communications have changed dramatically.

These days email is still a preferred method of communication for many people. Even if we use sites like Facebook, NextDoor, or SQLServerCentral to communicate with others, we often get notifications of changes through email. If you're like me, many of you might keep far too many emails in your mailbox, rarely removing unnecessary ones. In the era where we measure storage in dozens or hundreds of GB, or even in TB, do we bother to even manage text communications?

Some firms do require this, often for legal reasons. With the GDPR, I wouldn't be surprised to see more organizations starting to set retention policies that ensure that communications don't live forever. There are some systems that do this now, but the practice isn't ubiquitous, but maybe it will be soon. Google is redesigning Gmail, which will include Confidential Mode. Not only will there be limits on these emails, but one of the more interesting is the ability to expire an email and have it automatically deleted.

I don't love the idea of having communications disappearing, but that might be because of the way I've grown up. I don't like using Snapchat with my kids, because I don't want pictures I take to disappear. However, younger generations don't feel this way. As I wonder why I try to hold onto old communications and records, I start to wonder if the idea of expiring data is something that we should be embracing as data professionals. Do we really need sales records from a decade ago? Are recordings of web traffic valuable from the early days of SQLServerCentral? Is there really any point to holding onto much of the data we generate? 

I know that there are corporations that hold onto decades of paper records. I worked at one that had nearly a 100 years of old records, most of which might never be examined again. Likely plenty of them aren't even legible or useful at this point. They're being stored for, well, I'm not sure why. I'm sure there are plenty of writers that might come up with a detective story that requires old paper records, but I'm not sure there's practical use for this data.

I expect that we'll start to see organizations changing their record retention policies as we look to avoid more liability and risk from data breaches. Every old record, every piece of PII data that we no longer use probably needs to go. Even records for existing customers might need to be removed. I don't necessarily need to ever access the record of my first Amazon order from 1998. I'm really sure that Amazon having liability for holding my old address, which potentially could be used to validate identity, is a bad idea for both them and me.