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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.