In the PDF deck I linked to about my work, I describe storytelling like this:

Storytelling is sensemaking and placemaking of the: past (genealogy), present (diaries and journals) and future (personal [digital] archives).

At PDA2012, there had to have been half a dozen personal storytelling startups, most with a genealogy hook.

You have all the time in the world to scan photos, to write in your diary, but you're running out of time to ask your grandmother how she got that scar, or your grandfather why his hair turned white in the war.

Perhaps you've never been curious about your forebears, but to discount the possibility entirely out of fear that your children's children will enjoy pop-pop's stories so much they'll forget to live their own lives seems churlish to me.

I've read my grandmothers diary. It was extremely interesting, especially because I got a first persons account of world war II, and the way it affected her and the rest of the family.

But I don't feel like I have some kind of right to know anything beyond what she chose to tell and I hope my kids will have the good grace to look at me in a similar way. By the looks of it that won't be a problem.

It's one thing to be interested about ones forebears, another to be obsessed by it. When my mom went all out on some genealogy site and put all of my details in there as well as those of my spouse, kids and so on we asked her to please stop doing that.

Besides the obvious privacy angles I don't think kids that can't stand up for their rights should be included in the documentation that others place online, by the same token my kids and their descendants don't have an automatic right to any level of detail about me.

I remember that one of the dictators (Kim Yong-Il iirc) of NK had a film crew following him making a documentary about his life. The guy was batshit insane, and I feel that anybody that wants to document their live to that extent has an overgrown feeling of self importance.

Thanks for the detailed response!

I think this is a great illustration of the privacy (and thus related legal) issues that simply aren't being addressed in the research and commercialization efforts thus far. We saw a little of this with Instagram's photomap, that people's locations were being "outed" because they were tagged in someone else's photo and that person chose to make their locations public, but it's going to get more complicated before it makes more sense.