I finally reached my breaking point with promotional emails and desktop notifications a few weeks ago. I woke up at 7 a.m. to an automated email from Legacy.com with my friend’s death report in the subject line. The email itself was annoying enough, but what it said made it a cold, thoughtless nuisance: “It’s important to be remembered. The flowers you sent last year were a comforting gesture of compassion and support.”
I didn’t send any flowers. I planted a tree. That’s what my friend wanted. It was right there in the guestbook of the obituary. Legacy.com asked me to re-sign.
In fact, the Legacy.com email was just the last straw. It all started a few months earlier with a Microsoft OneDrive notification. I had just switched from Google Drive and was using an old Hotmail account that had been linked to my Xbox account for over a decade instead of a new email address. If you had told me that there were photos in the cloud storage of this email, I would not have believed you. I would swear I have never used cloud storage at this email address. But a day after I updated my subscription, a “On This Day” reminder notification popped up.
I clicked on it – and, oh my God, it was The a mistake. Microsoft OneDrive wanted me to remember one of the darkest times of my life by shoving photos of an abusive ex in front of me—photos I had forgotten existed. In a fit of anger, I deleted every single one of those photos from digital existence and canceled my OneDrive subscription. There are things you don’t need to be reminded of because you will never forget them.
Notifications can invade every moment of our lives, fighting for our attention without tact. Yes, we can disable them or click unsubscribe on emails that never made it to the junk folder, but the point is that they shouldn’t happen at all. Would we be okay with a stranger holding up a sign that said “Hey!” Do you remember when your friend died?” as they walked towards us in a cemetery? Would we tolerate our ex-spouse screaming, “It should have been me!” in the middle of our wedding ceremony? I have enough intrusive thoughts running through my head every day. I don’t need an algorithm that amplifies them because it mathematically concluded that I want to see what it wants to show me.
On the other hand, like all technologies, notifications are tools. Receiving too many can distract and overwhelm us, but we may forget something important if we receive too little. And while we have the ability to customize what notifications we receive, the companies that create these apps don’t have much incentive to relinquish control because they want us to use their products as much as possible. (Seriously, Duolingo, relax. There’s no need to cry over my missed Klingon lesson.) Making things even more complicated is the fact that you have to figure out which buttons to tap in your settings to find the best middle ground between the ones you want and those who find notifications deserve the silent treatment.
I’ve now limited my smartphone notifications (mainly by purchasing a “dumb phone”), but email and cloud storage notifications have remained like an endless game Crazy Gator – although I don’t remember signing up for most of them. And the moment they appear, I find it easier to dismiss them than to figure out how to turn them off for good. I always intended to deal with my email and cloud drive settings, but a week turned into a month, then a month turned into a year – and now I have 414 active email subscriptions and a cloud drive, which I never log in to because I’m afraid of the pop-UPS.
But it’s even more shameful when you use your own photos and memories – even the good ones – to capture your attention. It’s convenient to store them in the cloud even if you turn off all “On This Day” notifications. But that cloud is a technology company’s server that can lock you out of your reminders if you cancel your subscription. What then?
An extreme solution by today’s standards is to store everything on an external drive that no one but you has access to. You lose the convenience of being able to access it from any device at any time, but you gain something much better: privacy. This is where I will save all my photos from now on. I’ve decided against getting a NAS because it’s too much work, but it would be nice to still be able to access my stuff from anywhere. I’m tired of dealing with emotionally clueless algorithms and automated emails that feign compassion to get me to engage with websites. My memories are not marketing tools.