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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.
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
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.