A modern problem

Nowadays, we are using an increasing number of services relying over the "cloud technology" (SaaS - Software as a Service- website oferring storage services for photos, videos, mails, socials networks, blogs, and so on...). Through these offers, we are storing personal datas, most of which belonging to our digital heritage: some of these data are invaluables for our children in a familial context (thinks to mails, photos or videos), alternatively invaluable in an historical context (thinks to articles or informatic code).

This is new for us, because we used to stored our data over proprietary hard disks up to now. This situation is rising a number of questions and needs, to which it is crucial to give quickly some answers, for ethical reasons.

A need for an Ethic.

Through the cloud computing technology, our personal data are actually mainly managed by private interests, obeying to its own economical logic. This situation is raising questions of ethical nature. This is dramatically illustrated by the increasing debates raised by the very users of the big digital landscape actors, as FaceBook, Youtube, but also Google, Microsoft, and so on.

Because these actors are proposing mass services, allowing to any of us to store personal data that belongs clearly to our digital heritage, an ethical management of these contents becomes an urgent need.

A need for Collective Memory.

Nowadays , the digital archive technologies allow to benefit of a quite perenial storage of our personal data. Hence the technologies allow to any of us to constitute a digital patrimony, but also to reasonably hope that this heritage will be transmitted to future generations.

This is a new situation also: the trans-generational heritage of individual memory is now possible at a large scale, allowing a sharp testimony for personal or historical purposes. This fact is about to have impacts over our societies, because such a memory has a familial and cultural cohesiveness meaning. 

The Digital Heritage of Individuals is already a reality

Creating a structure and an information system dedicated to it is an urgent need.

A need for Democracies.

We are all witnesses of the increasing debates concerning freedon and Internet, e-democracy, that concerns all of us. Such debates comes at the very time where the "cloud computing" technology is arising as a major source of social innovation.

These debates reflects an urgent needs towards a democratic management of hosting services, specially when these storage systems targets personal data.

A need for the Digital Economy.

There is two reasons for which the Mnemosine initiative should interest the digital economy actors.

The first is that, as already pointed out, the commercial offer of these actors suffers from the ethical debates coming from their management of personal datas. However, these majors can not tackle efficiently the ethical problems raised by their own services, the deep reason coming from their very capitalistic nature :

structures facing shareholders hazards will never be able to propose a convincing perenial ethical framework. 

To propose a perenial and ethical hosting service of storage of personal data to these actors should reinforce their Market positions, allowing them to safely develop their offers.

The second comes from the diversity of the commercial offer, that tends to fragment and scatter our personal data, storing them into various hosting services. This situation is a real difficulty to constitute a digital heritage for any of us, for technical reasons of course, but also for juridical ones. Mnemosine imposes that the digital space of any of us is one and indivisible. This is the only reasonable alternative for the constitution of an individual numerical heritage.