I think this is going to be a big problem, even without the specific hard-failure mode of encryption — people are generating tons and tons of data and most of it goes in the same place and is frequently hard to manage.<p>A generation ago, when someone died their next of kin were probably going to be reasonably comfortable donating the contents of their office to the local university — you could quickly scan to see if there was anything truly bizarre hidden in the closet, most people didn&#x27;t take that many photographs (especially NSFW ones, what with meddling clerks) and you could quickly look over the ones they did have to make sure there wasn&#x27;t anything you wanted, etc.<p>Now, though, almost everyone carries around high-quality cameras and generates gigabytes a year of geo-located pictures. Many casual conversations which would have been lost forever are now recorded. Some of it might be easy to exclude (“Scholars will just have to live without the Chief Justice&#x27;s online dating history”) but it&#x27;s hard to imagine being able to quickly go through a mixed service like Facebook or a cloud photo backup service without some potentially embarrassing oversights.<p>I&#x27;d bet the most likely outcome of this would be scholars having to wait for increasingly long embargo periods to expire to avoid the odds of data-mining or computer vision finding unwanted links to people who are still alive.<p>That&#x27;s not to say that this didn&#x27;t happen in the past – a good example was the time that Justice Thurgood Marshall donated his papers to the Library of Congress under terms allowing access after his death, leading to a minor firestorm when a clever Washington Post reporter used them for insights about other people who were still serving on the Supreme Court:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1993&#x2F;05&#x2F;26&#x2F;us&#x2F;chief-justice-assails-library-on-release-of-marshall-papers.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1993&#x2F;05&#x2F;26&#x2F;us&#x2F;chief-justice-assails-l...</a>