[e-privacy] Escaping the data panopticon: Prof says computers must learn to "forget"

[Andrea Glorioso]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070509-escaping-the-data-panopticon-teaching-computers-to-forget.html

Escaping the data panopticon: Prof says computers must learn to "forget"

By Nate Anderson | Published: May 09, 2007 - 08:52AM CT

The rise of fast processors and  cheap storage means that remembering,
once incredibly   difficult  for  humans, has   become simple.  Viktor
Mayer-Schšnberger, 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."

Mayer-Schšnberger lays out   his idea in  a   faculty research working
paper called  "Useful  Void: The  Art  of  Forgetting in  the Age   of
Ubiquitous Computing," where he describes his plan as reinstating "the
default of forgetting our societies have experienced for millennia."

Why would we want our machines to "forget"? Mayer-Schšnberger suggests
that we are creating a Benthamist panopticon by archiving so many bits
of knowledge  for so  long.  The accumulated weight  of  stored Google
searches, thousands of  family photographs, millions  of books, credit
bureau  information,    air  travel reservations,  massive  government
databases,  archived  e-mail, etc., can   actually  be a detriment  to
speech and action, he argues.

"If  whatever we do  can be held  against  us years later,  if all our
impulsive  comments are preserved, they can  easily be combined into a
composite picture  of ourselves," he writes  in the paper. "Afraid how
our words and  actions may be perceived  years later and taken out  of
context, the lack of forgetting may prompt us to speak less freely and
openly."

In other words, it threatens to make us all politicians.

In contrast  to omnibus data protection legislation, Mayer-Schšnberger
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." Essentially, this means   that all collected data is  tagged
with a new piece of metadata  that defines when the information should
expire.

In practice, this would mean that iTunes could  only store buying data
for a limited time, a time defined by law. Should customers explicitly
want this time extended, that would be  fine, but people must be given
a  choice.  Even    data  created  by   usersÑdigital   pictures,  for
exampleÑwould be tagged by the cameras that create them to expire in a
year or two; pictures that people want to keep could simply be given a
date 10,000 years in the future.

Mayer-Schšnberger wants  to help us  avoid becoming digital pack rats,
and  he  wants  to  curtail  the  amount  of time   that companies and
governments can collate  data about users  and  citizens "just because
they  can."  Whenever there's  a   real need to  do   so, data can  be
retained, but setting the default expiration date forces organizations
to decide if they truly do need to retain that much data forever.

It's  a  "modest"  proposal, according   to  Mayer-Schšnberger, but he
recognizes that others may see   it as "simplistic" or "radical."   To
those who feel like  they are living in  a  panopticon, it might  feel
more like a chink in the wall through which fresh air blows.

Filed under: Harvard, Data, Privacy, Law


--
      Andrea Glorioso || http://people.digitalpolicy.it/sama/cv/
          M: +39 348 921 4379	     F: +39 051 930 31 133
       "Truth is a relationship between a theory and the world;
       beauty is a relationship between a theory and the mind."
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