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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."
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.
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.
With the right kind of laws in place, it would become much more onerous for a company to keep the data it collects longterm rather than throw it away as soon as possible.
My, my, hey, hey.
Offtopic mod for your post? I guess... but the lyrics of that song actually have some relevance.
Out of the blue [blue == anonymity]
and into the black [black == data records]
They give you this, [free services]
but you pay for that [with loss of privacy]
And once you're gone, [not using their services anymore]
you can never come back [into anonymity]
When you're out of the blue
and into the black.
Of course, I think Neil Young was referring to death and fame, not services and privacy. But the man has a real way with words.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
... 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.
It might help them retain customers. The two reasons that I switched to using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine were the user interface and the privacy policy. The do a double-bounce trick when you leave the site to block the referrer information, so even if a site is running Google analytics, Google does not get information on my search terms. If they had a better privacy policy (and hadn't spent a lot of effort this year making their user interface worse), I might still be providing them with that data.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There are companies that exist now whose sole purpose in life is to pull together peoples' personal information from disparate sources, combine that information into astonishingly detailed profiles of just about anyone in the United States, and sell that information to interested parties (collection agencies/repo men for example).
This is despite the fact that data mining as a discipline is still relatively young. Since data mining is such a profitable discipline, it is almost guaranteed to develop at a much faster pace than our ability to obfuscate our personal identity.
I wouldn't worry about it all that much though... it's not like I've got anything to hide!
However, because of the data Google collects from their users, they are in a better position to know (1) who doesn't like their personal data stored, (2) what data shouldn't be stored, and (3) what is the optimal data degradation/removal to be used for said person.
It's the same with ads. You might say "Let me choose my own ads!" but Google knows better than you do what you like.
I wrote a post to alt.drugs one night when I was in college in 1990. I started getting flak about it five or six years ago from one relative after another (starting with my mother) as they got on the Internet and did searches for my name. No matter what I accomplish in life, my alt.drugs post from 20 years ago stubbornly remains on the first page of Google results.
There are companies that exist now whose sole purpose in life is to pull together peoples' personal information from disparate sources, combine that information into astonishingly detailed profiles of just about anyone in the United States, and sell that information to interested parties (collection agencies/repo men for example).
ChoicePoint. And they got caught selling information to criminals (and I don't mean just the corporate type) as well as suffering some severe security breaches. Not a good thing at all, and when I heard about that it made me question the validity of their business and whether it's worth the risk to society.
This is despite the fact that data mining as a discipline is still relatively young. Since data mining is such a profitable discipline, it is almost guaranteed to develop at a much faster pace than our ability to obfuscate our personal identity.
The problem here is that when you accumulate too much of just about anything it becomes dangerous. Put a hundred tons of TNT in a warehouse ... sooner or later someone is going to get hurt. The same thing happens when you collect terabyte after terabyte of personal data and store it away. Yes, it's valuable ... but just as we have restrictions on how explosives can be transported and stored, we need some serious regulation of how and why corporations can store personal data, and when they must, by law, divest themselves of it. Unfortunately, governments (specifically I'm talking about mine, the United States Federal Government) view these giant private data stores as a way to perform data mining that would be illegal as hell if they were to try and do it themselves. So there's little motivation on the part of our lawmakers to try and do anything about this issue.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Because digital data is far easier to copy and maintain over time than it is to degrade it manually.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);