Virtual Hoarding

This chapter outlines hoarding issues involving virtual or digital goods (including video and image files, digital documents, etc.) in the context of workplace and household settings. It covers “dark data” security issues and intellectual property concerns as well as matters related to information flow. It discusses research about why and how individuals hoard both physical and virtual entities, outlining how this hoarding can negatively impact particular systems. The chapter also includes reflections about the moral and personal dimensions of virtual hoarding, with an emphasis on information ethics and concerns about strategic and opportunistic hoarding. Virtual hoarding issues may not seem to be critical given the decreased costs of on-site and backup storage as well as relatively-inexpensive storage facilities in the Cloud. However, data that are not managed in terms of their formats, metadata, and substrata could certainly present issues for organizations; data that are inappropriately removed from the standard flow of information within organizations also present potential losses.