Harvard Prof Says Computers Need to Forget

Jessamine writes "A Harvard professor argues that too much information is being retained by computers, and the machines need to learn how to forget things as humans always have. "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." Will such massive databases make us all act like politicians? Is data retention creating a "panopticon"? These are questions that the good doctor raises."

Comments

Re:Forget?

[MyLongNickName]

Nope. Studies have been done on these 'suppressed memories'. The general consensus is that these memories are manufactured after the fact. What is scary is that when suppressed memories were all the rage about a decade ago, people were getting convicted based on this evidence. I wonder how many innocent people are still in jail based on pop-science.

Re:And in the spirit of things

[Yvanhoe]

Well, at the time, it was just considered anti-republican and being a friend of USSR. Don't confuse socialism (which is our moderate left wing movement) with communism (which is what you call also communism).

I must also remind that Chirac is a right-wing politician, staunch opponent to left-wing candidates. But I think that the saying of Churchill is considered true by many people : "If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain."

Re:Unrealistic

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm not sure I see where the connection is between privacy laws and social websites. Social websites contain material that is voluntarily posted by members, not material that is forced to be posted against one's will.

I'm not sure that's always true.

For example, I was talked into signing up for Facebook a while ago, when various friends starting using it to host their photo albums and logging in was required to see them. Over the next few weeks, I was bombarded with notifications: a friend has indicated that they know me, and how; another friend has identified me in 17 photographs; I have been labelled as holding this position in that organisation and went to some other place for a while.

Within a very short space of time, I decided that Facebook's entire modus operandi is based on getting friends to spy on each other. Despite the fact that I gave them nothing but the bare minimum data required to get an account (name, place of study, e-mail address), they now know what I look like, many of my hobbies, many people who know me and who we know in common, where I live, much of my academic history, and more. And I gave them none of this; it was all freely volunteered by my friends, probably without a second thought.

I deactivated my account on Facebook. In fact, after that incident, I decided that my paranoia really wasn't a side-effect of the high concentration of tin foil in my kitchen, and was justified. I deactivated all my accounts on social networking sites where I could easily be identified.

The only web site that remains is actually Slashdot, where I post using this alias but someone who really wanted to could probably data mine my 6,000 or so posts and get a fair idea of who I am. I also post to Usenet, using my real name, but mostly on technical forums and always with an awareness that what I'm writing may be archived without my consent. Even there, I no longer use my surname or give obvious personal information like a verifiable e-mail address these days.

I think it is sad that things have come to this. I did find the social networking sites useful for keeping up with friends when we couldn't meet in real life for a while. However, knowing that (for example) Facebook still allows everyone to record information about me even though my account is now deactivated (and I therefore can't untag photos and so on), I do not regret my decision to reduce my on-line footprint dramatically.

I would prefer to be able to force these web sites to remove all personally identifiable information about me since we no longer have a relationship. This is where privacy laws here in the UK are hopeless, IMNSHO. As it stands today, I suspect that their terms of use protect them because I did consent to having an account, even though others supplied almost all of the personal information about me without my consent.

But even without such long-term safeguards, I'm glad I got clear before too much potentially damaging information about me was out there for all to see. I've been on the wrong side of a case of mistaken identity, and it is not fun.