Digital life stories have been solicited, archived, and Web-cast by organizations and individuals as a way of amplifying marginalized voices in the public domain. Despite the now large collections of digital stories that are available, researchers and policy makers have rarely discussed these stories as qualitative data and powerful evidence for decision making. We analyze the political, ethical and methodological tensions that have limited the use of digital life-story archives to date. In conclusion, we begin to set out future directions for analyzing and applying on-line archives of digital life stories research, drawing on debates within existing research that uses large-scale qualitative datasets.