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Google Urged To Let Personal Data Fade Away

Posted by timothy on from the dust-in-the-wind dept.

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."

13 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. In related news by Bovius · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  2. Great idea! by Rogerborg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Great idea! by ciaohound · · Score: 3, Insightful

      take a huge pile of cash and slowly burn it to the ground

      Ah, the '90's. It's hard to believe they've been gone for a whole decade already.

      --
      Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
    2. Re:Great idea! by DriedClexler · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah, it sounds like yet another professor blowing good money to produce a study that 4chan could debunk in an hour.

      Still, it got me thinking about a sort of similar idea: instead of expecting corporations to stab themselves in the eye by degrading their data, what about using a kind of data that is designed to become less useful over time, and then, as an individual, only sharing that kind of data with businesses.

      Think about it this way: why do they put your date of birth on your ID cards rather than your age? Well, duh, your age while change over time but your DOB won't. If you ever need to know someone's age, you can infer it from the current date and their DOB.

      So if you gave your age to a company you're doing business with, that information becomes less useful over time because you're less likely to still be that age. (Of course, if they record the time you gave them that data, they can get pretty close, but just focus on the general concept.) Giving your age would be preferable to giving your DOB.

      Similarly, telling someone where I live right now is less useful information as time goes by, as there's a chance I could have moved that increases with time. Or consider credit cards and email addresses that exist for only temporary usage.

      Is it possible, then, to reformat other kinds of data so that they become less useful over time? People could feel safer giving this data to someone.

      --
      Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
    3. Re:Great idea! by angelwolf71885 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      umm didn't we just piss away a huge pile of cash in January 2009?

    4. Re:Great idea! by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Uh, that's different. Michael Richards did something that should have struck anyone at the time as being impossible to live down. My alt.drugs post wasn't stupid (except for being in alt.drugs), not even interesting. I warned people about the low LD-50 of an over-the-counter medicine. (Lots of people now seem to think "LD-50" is a roofie or something.)

      Google displays USENET posts that go back to 1981, when the future of the Internet was unforeseen by anyone. Even Nostradamus was posting pictures of his penis on the alt.binaries groups back then. None of the posts you see Google pulling up would have been written if their authors knew that Google would be proudly showing them to everyone 20, 30 years later whenever anyone searches for your name.

  3. Benefit? by Aladrin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  4. Good luck with that by spartacus_prime · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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  5. People change as does your data. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  6. Instead, we can grow up by Improv · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Instead, we can grow up by geekoid · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Enough people will have so much stupid stuff recorded no one will care anymore. That will be a good day.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    2. Re:Instead, we can grow up by nine-times · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm a bit torn. I don't think you're wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised if some people end up sort of "branded for life" because their personal info never goes away. It'd be nice to think we could all "grow up", but... well, have you met people? Like, in real life, have you talked to real people about stuff? Do you really think they're going to "grow up"?

      On the other hand, you're right that this level of information probably shouldn't matter, and perhaps our culture will evolve to deal with having this level of information available. Also, I somewhat like the idea of having so much historical information available; perhaps one day our computers will be able to do interesting things with this glut of information.

      Either way, I'm going to stick to the good old strategy of using aliases, and hope that nobody ever realizes that "nine-times" is really "Bill Gates".

  7. Privacy : look into the wrong direction by kentsin · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.