Notifications still remind us of things we’d rather forget

My breaking point with promotional emails and desktop alerts finally happened a few weeks ago. I woke up at 7am to an automated email from Legacy.com with my friend’s death faker in the subject line. The email itself was irritating enough, but what it said made it a cold, thoughtless annoyance: “Being remembered is important. The flowers you sent last year were a comforting gesture of sympathy and support.”

I didn’t send flowers. I planted a tree. That’s what my friend wanted. It was right there in the obituary guestbook that Legacy.com was asking me to sign again.

In fact, the Legacy.com email was just the final straw. Things started a few months earlier by a notification from Microsoft OneDrive. I had just switched from Google Drive and instead of creating a new email address, I used an old Hotmail account that has been linked to my Xbox account for over a decade. If you had told me I had photos in cloud storage from that email, I wouldn’t have believed you. I swear I never used cloud storage with that email address. However, the day after I updated my subscription, a “On This Day” memories alert popped up.

I clicked on it – and, my God, it was what an error. Microsoft OneDrive wanted me to remember one of the darkest moments of my life by shoving photos of an abusive ex in my face – photos I had forgotten existed. In a fit of rage, I deleted every one of those photos from digital existence and canceled my OneDrive subscription. There are some things you don’t need to be reminded of because you will never forget them.

Notifications can invade every moment of our lives, tactlessly fighting for our attention. Yes, we can turn them off or click “unsubscribe” on emails that never went to the junk folder, but the point is that they shouldn’t be happening in the first place. Would we be okay with a stranger holding a sign that said, “Hey! Remember when your friend died? as they ran up to us in a cemetery? Would we accept our ex-partner shouting, “That was supposed to be me!” in the middle of our wedding ceremony? Many intrusive thoughts run through my head daily. I don’t need an algorithm that reinforces them because it mathematically concluded that I want to see what it wants to show me.

On the other hand, like all technology, notifications are tools. Receiving too many can distract us and overwhelm us, but we can forget something important if we receive too few. And while we have some ability to adjust which notifications we receive, the companies that create these apps don’t have much incentive to hand over control because they want us to use their products as much as possible. (Seriously, Duolingo, relax. You don’t have to cry over my missed Klingon class.) It’s even trickier to have to figure out which buttons to tap in your settings to find the best compromise between which notifications you want and which deserve the silent treatment.

I now controlled my smartphone notifications (mostly by purchasing a “dumb phone”), but emails and cloud storage alerts remained an endless game of Crazy Gator – although I don’t remember signing up for most of them. And the moment they appear, it’s easier to dismiss them than to figure out how to shut them down for good. I always intended to dig deeper into my email and cloud drive settings, but a week became a month, then a month became a year – and now I have 414 active email subscriptions and a cloud drive which I never log into because I fear it will appear. -ups.

But there’s something more nefarious about using your own photos and memories – even the good ones – to get 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 server owned by a technology company that can lock your memories if you cancel your subscription. And then?

An extreme solution by today’s standards is to store everything on an external drive where no one but you has access. You lose the convenience of accessing them from any device, anywhere and at any time, but you gain something much better in return: privacy. So that’s where I’m going to keep all my photos from now on. I avoided getting a NAS because it seems like a lot of work, but it would be nice to still be able to access my stuff from anywhere. I’m tired of dealing with emotionally unconscious algorithms and automated emails pretending to be sympathetic to engage with websites. My memoirs are not marketing tools.