WhatsApp’s controversial new Terms of Service update will begin rolling out on May 15. Users who do not accept the new ToS will have vital features and access to their chat logs gradually restricted. If you are not a fan of the new policy, back up your chats ASAP!

Back in January of this year, WhatsApp came under fire prior to a scheduled policy change. The new Terms of Service would mandate sharing data with Facebook and its other product/subsidiaries. Users who did not accept, would no longer be able to continue using the app. Many users felt that this encroached on their privacy and outrage ensued.

In the end, the ToS update was pushed later into the year with similar terms, albeit improved clarity. As the calendar rolls to May 15 these new ToS will gradually come into effect. We are told, WhatsApp will progressively restrict more features from users who refuse to accept these new terms. This includes only being able to respond to calls and chat messages as well as hiding chat logs!

You read that right, WhatsApp will be able to keep all your message history and family photos away from you, if and until you agree to the new terms. The good news is that these restrictions won’t hit immediately on the 15th. A clarification made in response to an inquiry from Tech Crunch, states that the log-block will show up at an unspecified point past May 15th.

It should be noted that the updated ToS changes are still not popular with everyone, with German regulators going so far as to issue an order banning the proposed terms. So if you’ve got any birthday photos or study notes lying in group chats, now would be the ideal time to make a copy.

To learn more about how to export/migrate your WhatsApp data, check out our WhatsApp Emigration Guide.

r/DataHoarder is perhaps one of the largest data hoarding groups out there. Once a humble subreddit, it now hosts over 200 thousand members!

What do they do?

The namesake of DataHorde itself; data hoarding, digital hoarding, e-hoarding or whatever you want to call it refers to making massive collections or archives of digital data. From photos of cats you find online, to digitized records of family trees… Anything you can keep on your computer can be hoarded so to say.

Why? Everyone perhaps has their own objective. Some people want insurance if their favorite social media website shuts down. Others might want to preserve history. I suppose the general goal, not for your average data hoarder, but the kind of data hoarder on r/DataHoarder, is to ensure data worth keeping can be kept online.

How do they do it?

r/DataHoarder isn’t just about hoarding. It’s also a place of discussion for hardware and compression techniques for storing large amounts of information. It’s also a place for sharing things you’ve hoarded up or websites you might come across like online museums. It’s a place for sharing tools made for extracting content from websites or digitizing junk you might have lying around at home.

More than anything, r/DataHoarder is a forum. The subreddit itself doesn’t partake in serious projects all to often, but people who meet/find each other here might go on to do great things. A lot of us who worked on the YouTube annotations project met here on r/DataHaorder, the same goes for the team who’s working on The Eye.

How do I sign up?

Open a reddit account and head on over to https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder. It’s really that simple. Become a data hoarder today!

Looking to discover other archiving communities? Just follow Data Horde’s Twitter List and check out our other Community Spotlights.