Mobile media is a chief driver of digitizing locational information, geotags, and photos that are produced and collected as we communicate with and exist within our networks. But when these data are stored and recorded—in quantities that far exceed any of our abilities to manage—mobile technology denies our ability to actively forget. This article argues that digital ephemerality via mobile applications (i.e. Snapchat, Signal, Confide, and Facebook Messenger Secret) has emerged because of the granular possibilities for data retention enabled by mobile devices. Together these applications move towards a practice of preventing data from being stored and shared. In response, “data prevention” is proposed as an ethical framework for ephemeral mobile media, and is theorized with an eye toward the distributed agency inherent to networks. This ethics is positioned within a framework of distributed agency across stakeholders that draws most directly from actor–network theory, and three commonly articulated values—trust, transparency, and privacy—are proposed. These values help to define a system of networked practices within ephemeral mobile media that requires consideration of both human and non-human actors. Building sustainable ephemeral technologies necessitates aligning shared values amongst divergent stakeholders. The article concludes by motioning to LIMITS research, where data prevention might be included, linking and further intensifying shared values across technical and social concerns.

Technological innovation depends on earthly resources. As such, the drive to continuous growth that has propelled technology forward is also in direct competition with a planet that is reaching capacity. This expansion and consumption model has both supported and neglected the data of the dead, which both proliferates and languishes. For example, as researchers across disciplines have noted, the dead may soon outnumber the living on social media. Questions about digital remains should attend not only to social media profiles but also to the life cycles of data. This paper considers environmental and resource-related questions about the traces we leave when we depart. To do this work, a theoretical methodological approach following the Computing within LIMITS model (Nardi et al, 2018) is employed to consider the accumulation of data that remains after users have departed from their earthly (and digital) lives. LIMITS is a sustainability model that asks researchers to (1) question growth, (2) consider models of scarcity, and (3) reduce energy and material consumption. That is, this paper questions the life of digital data that can be maintained and can even grow after a user passes on. In addition to questions about mourning, memorializing, and archiving the dead, the LIMITS model prompts ethical questions about how to bury our dead data responsibly and sustainably in the face of exponential growth.