Following the decline in popularity of its failed social media platform, and a spate of security breaches, Google announced it would be deleting all data from Google+ beginning in April, but there are those out there that intend to preserve its somewhat underwhelming legacy.
It’s the Internet Archive’s goal to conserve large swathes of the internet in a vast online library so that our rich digital history isn’t at the mercy of various website authors and server hosts that otherwise preside over the data. “Our mission is to provide universal access to all knowledge”, the Archive’s website claims.
As such, the task of preserving the legacy of all the public Google+ posts has been put to the Internet Archive, and in a public announcement via Reddit, the organisation revealed it had commenced the archival process using automated scripts to trawl through the social platform.
Don't want your comments to be immortalized?
Naturally, there are some limitations being enforced in order to manage the undertaking – only posts currently labeled as ‘public’ will be archived, comment threads will have a hard cap of the first 500 comments, and videos and images won’t be stored in their original full resolution.
If you happen to have signed up for a Google+ account at some point and have made some public posts over the years you don't want the world to know about, you should get down to removing these now – or mark them as private.
There is, however, a chance your public post has already been archived, in which case the Internet Archive has laid down a procedure for you to follow to request your post be removed from the site.
