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

data protection, from government and private

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't fix that a book can be taken the wrong way by burning the book.

Have Data Protection laws (as in the EU) which seem to revolve around the theme that data allowing one to identify a particular person is copyrighted to that person. Meanwhile, ensure that the Constitution is read in spirit to protect against the government even appropriating, let alone operating on, data without good reason.

No kidding

[wiredog]

I just pulled my credit report, which I do 3 or 4 times a year. My address at my old air defense outfit at Ft Polk (D 1/55 ADA) is still listed there.

I got out of the army in 1988.

Public databases need to forget

[GauteL]

Right now, you can find 10 year old newsgroup postings from myself when searching Google. That is in my opinion too much data retention. I don't think they are particularly embarrassing now, but there was a time when my 10 year old newsgroup postings would have been posted when I was 14-15 or so.

They embarrasseed me, and I don't think I should be expected to be cautious about this issue when in my teens. People forget most of your silly mistakes from such a while ago but databases do not, unless you instruct them to.

Re:Public databases need to forget

[Chrisje]

My brother in law (I'm 17 years younger than he is) always points out to any new girlfriend (or friend, for that matter) I bring home that he's "known him since he was still shitting his pants as a wee laddie".

This embarrassed me. And I don't think I should be expected to be cautious about this issue when in my pre-toddler years.

People don't forget squat, I'm afraid to say. At least computers/google have to be explicitly prompted to go find particular information. My brother in law freely disseminates it on any occasion he damn well pleases.

Lastly, I simply don't agree with the good doctor's assessment. If you come from a culture like the US where everything and everyone is covering their ass against some or other liability already, computer storage could possibly exacerbate those tendencies, but they hardly can be blamed for being the root cause.

If on the other hand you come from a culture where pretty much anything can be said in any type of discussion (Holland and Israel are funnily enough quite alike in that regard), computer storage won't do anything to strip that away. If you find something you said as a kid around here the tendency is to shrug it off or do a "ha-ha, nevermind".

Therefore I would argue that the reaction to the possibility of others seeing what you once said says more about the culture you come from than anything else. What strikes me as funny is that the Doctor is Austrian, and therefore should have a different perspective on things than most people you'd expect at Harvard. Although I saw his photo. In there, it doesn't look as though he has much of a perspective on anything. His whole thesis sounds like an exercise in misunderstanding causality, and poppycock knee-jerk reactions to something someone might have seen sometime somewhere.

I do however believe, from a technical perspective, in the wisdom of classifying data by desired retention times. This is because it's a simple cost-of-ownership question. You can't retain all your irrelevant data all the time on prime data storage solutions. It's just economically unsound and practically undesirable.

Unrealistic

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm all for personal responsibility, but this isn't as simple as standing by what you once said.

For one thing, no-one is perfect. If I took offence every time one of my friends said or did something a little childish or hurtful to another of my friends, I would have few friends left, yet I know that all of my friends are basically nice, decent people, who on balance I am glad I met. Magnify this up to the whole world stage, and suddenly the whole world is an a**hole.

Secondly, people's views change for many reasons, not all of them bad, and society as a whole is not good at recognising this. Just look at what happens to politicians today who change their position on an issue. "U-turn! U-turn!" As I've pointed out before, even in politics it is silly to think that our elected representatives have the time to fully study each issue on which they vote in the same detail as an expert, or to retain a staff of suitably smart and qualified people who can at least advise them well. Wouldn't you rather be represented by someone who would change their mind if they realised their previous position was short-sighted or ill-informed, rather than one forced by the system to stick to their guns even if they knew they had made a mistake?

I've commented on this subject before on Slashdot, in the context of social networking sites. I think humanity needs to learn that in a highly-connected world, you have to be careful what you say, you have to be wary of reading too much into what others say, and most important of all, you have to cut people a little slack sometimes. Right now, IMHO, our laws don't place nearly enough value on privacy, and I think this is a painful lesson that we are going to learn as an entire generation who grew up with the likes of Facebook, Myspace and LiveJournal run into problems for the next few decades.

Bottom line: kids will be kids, adults will behave like kids sometimes, even the most mature and responsible adult makes mistakes, and all of this is only human. I, for one, would prefer not to live in a world where everyone's dirty laundry was aired in public, with full search features.

Yes, we do forget... and memories alter themselves

[demon driver]

but we need to consider the human memory. Do we really 'forget' things? Yes, we do - and more than that, even as long as we do remember, memory is not really fixed. As far as I understand (and if I remember correctly!) what I read about it a couple of months ago, memories in fact change slightly each time we recall them, by recalling them.

Which makes especially old memories a lot less reliable than we used to think. Which also is the basis for the phenomenon of people recreating their memories to what they want to remember. When someone strongly believes in a factually wrong memory of a certain event, even if he had been there and seen it as it happened, it may well be because at some point in time, after remembering and slightly changing the memory in a desired direction often enough, he might simply have no other memory left of the event.

Re:Responsibility

[sumdumass]

While some will argue that you shouldn't have to be anonymous in a free society, I would answer with they should be thinking about their future if they decide to post something then. But with that aside, I would say spot on.

You are right, there are plenty of ways to get a message out without having it directly pointed back at you. And seriously, if someone is worried about what might bite them latter in life, then I guess they need to take a more serious look at what they say and what they expect to be doing later in life. When someone is worried about what they believe in, it tells a lot about how strong their beliefs are and how crazy and sometimes wrong those beliefs are wring.

And truthfully, there are only a few people who will have it come back and byte them. Case in point, look at the distinguished senator from West Virginia. Robert C Byrd was a blatant racist and even went as far as rising to the top of his local Ku Klux Klan chapter and eventually became The Grand Pooh-Bah of recruiting for the Klan in his state area. But it doesn't stop there, as a member of the house of representatives, he attempted to stop the civil rights act of 1964 and again with the voting rights act. Yet today, all that is behind him and he is a prominent and respected leader of the democratic party without issue of his past except when some republicans bring it up about double standards.

I would guess that you don't even need to be anonymous if your position is right enough and you continue to be around those with like minds. And even if you change your mind, it doesn't matter that much if you continue to hang around the right crowd.

Expiration date on files

[ECS_Norway]

How hard would it be to put an expiration date on files? Say one or two years, and the file is deleted. There would also be archive files that would never delete. The original creator would decide on whether the file, or post, was archive or expiration. How many things have you posted online that really need to be here in two years?

Polluting the well

[HangingChad]

Yes, it's true specific incidents can last seemingly forever on the internet. But when you look at the increase in available data, it's staggering. And that data is spread out around hundreds of servers in different formats. But the more data, the more junk data. Outdated, incorrect entries and, sometimes, forged entries.

I manage a lot of data and have learned over the years how easy it is to pollute that well. Users are ingenious in their ability to get crap information in a system, no matter how tight you think your validation is. And importing data from an outside source...lol...even more of a nightmare. The ability of the internet to store information long term can also be used to hide information by clouding the waters.

So, years ago I started polluting my personal online data well. Instead of one or two profiles, I'd have five or six, all different. Different addresses, phone numbers, cities, states even race and gender. Five turned into ten, turned into 15 or 20 and then I lost count. Started doing the same thing to my online resumes. Cloned the resume under a different name, address and phone number. Created new resumes with the name withheld or changed with many subtle variations, swapped out phone numbers, email addresses. Started masking personal information behind my own LLC. Turned into my own personal Wild Weasel. Which one of the clones is really me? Hard to tell.

Haven't done that to my direct marketing profile and credit report...yet. But the day may come when I want to poison those wells. Don't need instant credit, pay cash for almost everything, including cars. You can play hell with your credit report by getting a camper or a boat and living on one of them for a while. I could park in my nephews back 40 for a couple months. Or live overseas, almost as good. Use PO boxes, change addresses so many times no one can keep up. Have one address for drivers license and vehicle registrations, a different one for online orders, another one for tax purposes. Use the wife's cell phone one week, mine the next. Change phone numbers twice a year. And, ironically, it's computers that give me the ability to keep up with all the different versions of myself.

No matter how good you are at consolidating data, there's always going to be someone like me with the knowledge to crap it up and make you work at manual consolidation. Got a lot of spare time on your hands to figure that out? :)

Re:And in the spirit of things

[homey of my owney]

It seems to me your observation has less to do with information, and more to do with believing your side is eternally right. When both sides drop that silly and divisive premise, THEN we can discuss unforgotten information used in the political arena.

Re:Love letters and Sherlock Holmes

[Kjella]

"We were both in the photograph."

"Oh, dear! That is very bad! Your Majesty has indeed committed an indiscretion."

For better or worse, todays answer would be: "Photoshopped"

Re:Responsibility

[ImaLamer]

This is quite true; there's a lot of adolescent drivel out there with my real name on it which I posted circa '93-95 (and some even later) that I didn't realise would be archived. Usenet then *was* seen to be ephemeral.

Even worse is when you were the only in the neighborhood with a real ISP. All my friends had AOL or Prodigy so they came to me to ask the USENET about drugs and other things... under my name.

I fear my next interviewer will know how to Google.

Re:Well, there you have it.

[rhakka]

Yeah, but couldn't you make the arguement that sure, for this transitional generation things are a little weird.. we are USED to only having a small picture of the people around us, so most of the people we interact with are 10% substance and 90% assumptions we make about them.

But what happens, when you live in a world where the public face and history of everyone is available forever?

could it be, could it just be that it becomes clearer what REALLY IS ok and normal, and what effects those things REALLY HAVE on who people are... if any?

I mean, heck in ten years we're going to know about the old drinking and drugging habits of the people applying for higher paid and more powerful positions. More to the point.. we're going to know about ALL OF THE CANDIDATES' habits.. in comparison, we may just have to realize that people are human and maybe we'll have to start having realistic, human expectations of them, instead of faulting everyone for every "sin" they may have ever committed, should we find out about it.