Forgetting Data
May 13th, 2007An ars technica article talks about a paper by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger called ‘Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing‘ in which he expresses his concerns about the amounts of data being ‘remembered’ by the systems that now permeate our lives.
The rise of fast processors and cheap storage means that remembering, once incredibly difficult for humans, has become simple. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor in Harvard’s JFK School of Government, argues that this shift has been bad for society, and he calls instead for a new era of “forgetfulness.”
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In contrast to omnibus data protection legislation, Mayer-Schönberger proposes a combination of law and software to ensure that most data is “forgotten” by default. A law would decree that “those who create software that collects and stores data build into their code not only the ability to forget with time, but make such forgetting the default.”
This ‘memory’ is an issue that has concerned me in the past. All people do things they regret and some may find that such memories return to haunt them; politicians sometimes discover that an admission of drug taking or an unpopular stance on an issue can impact a career. Even with a simple blog like this, I often pause before posting to consider how an entry or submission might be interpreted sometime in the future.