To Delete Or Not To Delete?

Whether or not companies can hold onto your data forever has become a pressing question for advocates of online privacy. One of those advocates is Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, who tells Kate Connolly that being able to forget something is an essential part of being human:

Our brains reconstruct the past based on our present values. Take the diary you wrote 15 years ago, and you see how your values have changed. There is a cognitive dissonance between now and then. The brain reconstructs the memory and deletes certain things. It is how we construct ourselves as human beings, rather than flagellating ourselves about things we’ve done.

But digital memories will only remind us of the failures of our past, so that we have no ability to forget or reconstruct our past. Knowledge is based on forgetting.

His solution?

Mayer-Schönberger, who advises companies, governments and international organisations on the societal effects of the use of data, advocates an “expiration date” (a little like a supermarket use-by date) for all data so that it can be deleted once it has been used for its primary purpose. “Otherwise companies and governments will hold on to it for ever.”

Josh Keating explores the complications:

More media is moving online, and digital records will increasingly be the only ones available.

If a politicians made racist comments in a newsletter in the 1980s, the record has hung around for future journalists to discover. Should they be allowed to disappear just because they’re written on a blog?

Responding to the objection that Google’s backups will make full deletion impossible, Mayer-Schönberger says “But if you can be deleted from Google’s database, ie if you carry out a search on yourself and it no longer shows up, it might be in Google’s back-up, but if 99% of the population don’t have access to it you have effectively been deleted,” he said.

Under this scenario, Google would have access to information that 99 percent of the population didn’t. Right to be forgotten laws may aim to empower users, but it seems to me that they would leave the search engines with the power in the relationship.