Featured, Society - Written Monday, February 15, 2010 by Naumi Haque - 8 Comments

Self-destructing data: The return of Internet privacy

There is no such thing as privacy on the Internet anymore—anything you say or do lives on ad infinitum in Internet memory. In the intro of his Harvard paper, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger notes that “In March 2007, Google confirmed that since its inception it had stored every search query every user ever made and every search result ever clicked on. Google remembers forever.” As one of the most pervasive tools of our generation, Google and its associated applications have changed the way we think about data, privacy, digital identity, and memory.

A recent article by Nate Anderson in Ars Technica highlights professor Mayer-Schönberger book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. The message: “Technology has now made ‘remembering’ the default approach to information, and in doing so, threatens to make ‘forgetfulness’ obsolete.” This is not only a profound change from 20 years ago, it can also be detrimental to our ability to think and analyze information. The article goes on to say: “Selective forgetfulness is a boon to humanity; it keeps us from drowning in our own recorded data. It allows us to sift and sort, then to think at a higher level of abstraction instead of wallowing in detail.”

But, this may all soon change.  Perhaps, computers can learn to forget too.

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