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Google Urged To Let Personal Data Fade Away
jee4all writes with this excerpt from E-week: "Researchers say personal information should 'degrade' — becoming less specific over time — to protect users' privacy. Rather than amassing personal data and holding on to it as long as legally possible, companies such as Google should allow the data to degrade over time, according to researchers. In an interview with the BBC this week, Dutch researcher Harold van Heerde discussed his work on the idea of allowing data to becomes less specific over time. Letting the specifics gradually disappear could protect consumer privacy while also meeting the needs of service providers, he said."
I always heard it was better to burn out...
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
Data naturally goes stale like bread, can be fed to ducks.
All of the language around "letting data degrade" seems to imply that it would be no work, no trouble at all for Google to make this happen. Just let it get less specific, that determining the rules for gracefully removing data while maintaining integrity is the natural order of database storage.
Let them eat cake.
While they're at it, they chould take a huge pile of cash and slowly burn it to the ground, because having things of value totally sucks. Ooh, ooh, and buy a Van Gogh and leave it out in the rain to dissolve!
I'd ask what he's smoking, but I think it's pretty obvious.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
When we have AI strong enough to understand personal data Google will soon become a trillion dollar business because of all the data it has.
Google could benefit from this according TFA? Seriously? Giving up data on their customers and replacing it with less useful data benefits them? I seriously doubt it. Especially since we've already seen what people in general think about privacy.
No, if Google wanted to go down that road, it would be MUCH smarter to allow people to specify how much of their personal data Google can have, and have a way to remove that data at any time.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Once you post something on the Internet, it doesn't really disappear. I Google myself from time to time and am shocked to find profiles on websites I haven't visited in ages. Periodically purging data would be a better idea, but then these providers would miss out on all the money they get from selling said data.
If you can read this, it means that I bothered to log in.
Then I'd stop finding two and three year old solutions to new problems in new versions of software. Yeah, you can "filter" Google search results by date, but filter features are mediocre at best... And I'm unaware of a way to make them persistent. The majority of my Google search now-a-days end up as "searchterm" and then twenty "-negativekeywords" following it.
Your data chances over time. What is marketable to you will change with age, income, politics, hormone changes, you name it. This makes sense to me.
The premise is wrong. Non-digital data fades because it takes considerable effort to prevent it doing so; it takes up room (so it gets chucked out), gets pissed on by cats, eaten by rats, set on fire, contaminated with fungus, made into paper aeroplanes.
A hard drive full of data doesn't really require much more care and feeding than an empty one; to selectively retire shit off it actually requires effort - and who can be arsed? Not me.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We'll learn to deal with the fact that people mature over time and the things they do when very young might not represent them when they're older. This lengthening of memories should let us mature a bit rather than try to hide in the bush.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Must be some sort of firm policy or they will be accused of selective policy.
Also, "Degrade" implies slow and gradual steps to me. How can this be done? Slowly randomly corrupt it?
Imagine the programing updates. These fields can be trusted if d_update 6 but otherwise...
A staged firm policy I could see. But if you miss a deadline or get ahead, then the lawyers eat you up. Also backups? Keep it, or nuke it. Allow access control to increase perhaps.
Dutch researcher Harold van Heerde discussed his work on the idea of allowing data to becomes less specific over time. Letting the specifics gradually disappear could protect consumer privacy while also meeting the needs of service providers
Sorta like me, for example?
The Wild Norseman -->
A Norseman -->
Some Guy -->
A Person, Place or Thing -->
A Nobody -->
Anonymous Coward
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
Except in Australia...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I don't see this happening. The "GoogleSphere" revolves around leveraging personal information. It's *ALL* about data mining and relationships.
You know, Google isn't the only one, organically your info can live in the Intertubes forever. It's up to the indevidual to protect their personal information, not blame someone else for their own stupidity of telling everyone on Facebook or whatever that they like to feel up boys while loaded on malt beer...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Another approach to this problem that we can all participate in is to add as much chaff to the system as possible. Every day, you should create at least 5 separate email addresses and sign them up for 5 different Facebook and Youtube accounts and have each "person" upload some stuff. That way, any company that does the wrong thing will eventually drown in it. Plus, you'll appear to have lots and lots of friends. Oh look, Osama bin Waldo just friended me.
"Marriage counselors say the subject of arguments should 'degrade' — becoming less specific over time — to protect spousal sanity. Rather than building a huge grudge and holding on to it as long as legally possible, typical marriages should allow the grudge to degrade over time, according to marriage counselors. In an interview with the BBC this week, Dutch researcher Harold van Hashpipe discussed his work on the idea of allowing the subjects of fights to becomes less specific over time. Letting the specifics gradually disappear could protect your marriage while also meeting the needs of your sex life, he said." ctrl+h=fun!
... because there are so many other alternatives to tracking users and users being too stupid to know about them. i.e. flash. There are all sorts of ways of figuring out who is browsing which, you should look at the number of you're loading data from/sending data to with noscript on. Data degradation would not do anything to stop techniques and companies who collect the same or more data under the radar through "legitimate" means.
The law has a similar provision. I think it would be a good thing as well as a bad thing considering the situation; however, I also think it is necessary. Reading some of the comments such as there should be an inference that people get older and wiser only suffices if everyone recognizes that as fact. The point is, if there is information to help someone gain at your expense, they WILL use it. Limitations are more than useful in this case. Have you ever made a mistake you would rather forget... forever...?
I think the key to it all would be logical aggregation.
Consider I do a search for "e3 2010" today. I'm sure millions have. For the moment, it's *ahem* important that Google knows exactly who I am so it can create targeted ads for me. But by next year, or the year after, what's the point?
Over time, change from the individual to the demographic. Out of those millions, there has to be at least a few that are of the same age, gender, geographic location, etc. as me. Does it really matter that *I* did it or that a something-year-old gender from city, state made the search? The only thing lost is an absolute who.
By simplifying the data, it becomes easier to mine.
Last i checked, Google already do this sort of thing, such as truncating IP data to 3 octets, then 2 octets.
And there was a movement within Google itself to anonymize data after a certain period, their very own "data detectives" or whatever the official name was. (with respect to Google and their strange naming conventions)
Personal information for peoples accounts?
Yeah, good luck pissing off over a million people when Google suddenly forgets their own name!
"Oh hey there some random dude, you successfully logged in to this here e-mail service, here are your e-mails, good luck finding your banking details. Yeah, we thought of that too, we removed your banks name, and your name, and anything relating to you."
SOUNDS INCREDIBLY USEFUL.
Face it, your privacy means shit. You want privacy? STOP BROWSING.
I would tend to argue that personally identified data will increase in value the longer data stream in continuous.
Imagine a 1 year study vs a 20 year study.
The fact is that we are at the very tip of this phenomena.
You could then even perhaps begin predicting large trends over the order of decades, based on individual inputs from the boots on the ground, everywhere reporting streams of identifiable information.
The data may be less valuable to you in terms of your own utility but do not imagine for a moment that it degrades in value to the archivists.
Regards.
Some local people think phone books (white pages), court announcements are hurting privacy.
Personal data is not secret.
The problem is that people with our personal data can harm us. Making profit from our data is not a crime, but hurting us, steeling money from our account, sent us spams were.
It is not a solution to lock down all personal data, which we will give away for good reasons.
It is to prevent someone to hurt us with our personal data. That is what going to be useful.
Europeans were very stupid, in they make privacy a problem, they raise the standard level and feel good. They use other people's resource and claim they are green.
Fading colors, changing sounds
Shades of night come tumbling down
Bring tomorrow like yesterday
Fade away
Here I am, a wayward man
Following the light to a distant land
Come tomorrow, without yesterday
Fade away
High adventure I just begun
Fame and fortune got me on the run
Break off the way
Fade away, yeah
Oh yes I am a wayward man
Following the light to a distant land
Come tomorrow, without yesterday
Fade away
Oh fade away, fade away
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3c/BadCompany_Run_With_The_Pack.jpg
This is very clever of you. But suppose millions of people do? Should everyone know where every bit of data on every device goes before he uses it?
When you put your personal information on the Internet, you accept that you lose control over that info. Or, you are an idiot. Which is it?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I wish Google would reconsider their policy of never recycling usernames.
companies such as Google should allow the data to degrade over time
Phrasing like this pisses me off. If Google's data degraded over time, it's not that they'd be "allowing" it to degrade, they'd have to do extra work and write extra code to force it to degrade. Saying "allow" implies that degrading is what data do naturally, and that Google is somehow artificially preserving it.
This advice doesn't make sense. Why should it degrade? They shouldn't record it in the first place! What private information do they need to "improve their service"? If they don't sell our personal data, then they shouldn't record it!
Informing people about the scams, shams, and bunk that assault them on a daily basis. http://www.jeremyduffy.com
that the value of 'personal data' degrades automatically over time. people change, interests fade quickly, data like that is probably useless after one week in this add stressed out world
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)
This is a really bad idea.
That data is incredibly valuable to future historians and has the potential to dramatically enlighten and improve the world.
Data wants to be free. Trying to put the genie back in the bottle is futile. This is just as dumb as DRM, if not more so.
The healthy solution to privacy concerns is to modify our culture and laws to adapt to higher levels of openness.
We should not be embarrassed of our affairs or afraid of others learning of them. The new openness afforded by technology can protect us. Yes, it exposes you to bad guys, but it also exposes the bad guys. This is precisely why open source software is the best solution to hackers.
That openness also leads to vastly improved government. If Obama had kept his promise to make government open, we would be seeing a revolutionary transformation in governance. If we saw him take a shit, shower, and shave, he would stop bothering to dress up and read teleprompters to address us. There's a huge efficiency gain right there. He would stop using uselessly flowery language, and we would just learn what the fuck is going on as he does. It would allow experts to see what is happening as he does, and it would give him "many eyeballs to make all problems shallow" at a scale that makes this same property of Linux look like kid's play.
What we need to get over is our Puritan pre-occupation with chastity.
We also need to completely overhaul our legal system, which is horribly outmoded by its reliance on witness accounts and sussing out the truth and using lawyers to adjudicate this messy process. We have the data and footage now. We should be able to flush a good number of our lawyers down the toilet. There's just a lot less point to them. Our laws should be fuzzier. We can now see the context of the situations that create conflict, and we can see directly from them whether one person was the antagonizer, another the victim, whether one or both were behaving childishly, and whether either of them is lying. And it all becomes painfully obvious by scrubbing through a lot of data and footage.
The key is *not* to delete the data. It's to insist that the data become freely available to everyone instead of an elite few who can more easily exploit it.
This also forces an overhaul of capitalism, which is the world's oldest broken MMO, patched into a frankencodebase, horribly unbalanced and unfair, and desperately in need of a rewrite. When all becomes open, this makes markets obvious, forces us to find new ways to assign wealth instead of by way of secrecy. Secrecy is both the primary driver of wealth in this modern economy and the cause of colossal tragedies. The BP spill would not have happened if that data were open. The war in Iraq would not have happened if the data were open. The attack on the twin towers would not have happened because the CIA would not have been able to secretly train bin Laden to fight the Russians in Afghanistan and turn him into a monster. The nuke that al Queda is almost certainly going to detonate someday in the US would not have happened, because it would just be too easy to see what's going on. Microsoft Windows would have been a vastly superior operating system if we had been able to see and fork the source, saving millions of man-years of wasted productivity to bugs, spam, and botnets. The Enron stupidity would have been caught early on, as would have the credit default swaps that infected the financial system. Huge rivers of money wasted on fattening Wall Street would dry up.
We need to learn to live in glass houses. While insisting on privacy seems noble on the surface, it is how the corrupt and the elites stay in power. We use leaks in the veil to create mountains of scandal which simply wouldn't be that interesting otherwise.
This is the concept we need to get over and quickly. The survival of the species depends on it.
then all internet "consumer" endpoints will become NAT'd. They will only know that someone on your subnet went somewhere.
From what I read the delete forever doesn't necessarily delete from their servers. If I indicate delete forever I'd like to think it's you know, deleted forever