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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."

30 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Fade away? by ak_hepcat · · Score: 4, Funny

    I always heard it was better to burn out...

    --
    Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
    1. Re:Fade away? by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 4, Funny

      I'm degrading over time so why not my personal data?

    2. Re:Fade away? by Red+Flayer · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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
    3. Re:Fade away? by kestasjk · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Because digital data is far easier to copy and maintain over time than it is to degrade it manually.

      --
      // MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
  2. 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.

    1. Re:In related news by sortius_nod · · Score: 2, Funny

      I don't think it's healthy to feed ducks cake...

    2. Re:In related news by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Wildly off topic here, but if you want something entertaining, throw an entire slice of bread (or, better, pitta bread) to the ducks. One of them will grab it whole and then swim away as fast as it can from the others. As it does, the bread will drag in the water and bits will drop off. Most of the bread goes to the ducks following it. It's entertaining to watch, and is probably a metaphor for the music industry or something.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  3. 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 martin-boundary · · Score: 3, Interesting
      The value of information is not absolute. All it takes is the right kind of legislation, like what the EU privacy directives attempt to do, to change the value from positive to negative.

      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.

    4. Re:Great idea! by angelwolf71885 · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

    5. Re:Great idea! by gregrah · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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!

    6. Re:Great idea! by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    7. Re:Great idea! by ScrewMaster · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.
    8. 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.

  4. 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
    1. Re:Benefit? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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
  5. 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.

    --
    If you can read this, it means that I bothered to log in.
  6. It would certainly help with search results. by earls · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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 by+(1706743) · · Score: 2, Funny

      Indeed; when the generation which grew up on myspace and facebook produces "important" people (e.g., congresspeople, senators) it's likely that the only candidates with no dirt on them are the ones who were socially inept in their college days.

      Come to think of it, that might give the /. crowd something of an edge...

    3. 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".

  9. Discovery in legal cases? by maxwells_deamon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  10. Sorta Like This? by The+Wild+Norseman · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  11. Data degradation useless... by blahplusplus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... 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.

  12. Stupid phrasing by JakeD409 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Stupid phrasing by The+MESMERIC · · Score: 2, Informative

      But Google is ARTIFICIALLY preserving it.
      It is called PageRank. It strengthens OVER time.

      (Damn I give up!)