Think your Facebook photos are embarrassing now? How about in 500 years when the only known record of you is a picture of that time you drank nine margaritas at Senor Frogs in Cancun? Whether or not we want the internet to forever store our information is the existential quandry at the center of the French Droit a l’Oubli movement which, as Peter Fleischer, Google’s Privacy Counsel, explains on his blog [via Slashdot] roughly translates into “right to forget” or “right to oblivion.”
Some of the more immediate privacy concerns have already been debated at length. We have the right to delete information we post ourselves (although often this is archived) but not the right to take down what someone has written about us or reposted from us. It might be annoying that an article that has been written about us might stay up on Google for the rest of our natural lives, but I think it’s a small price to pay for a robust, free media.
Where things really get interesting is when we start looking at internet privacy in the long-term. The Droit a l’Oubli movement wants all information to essentially auto-expire, to disappear off the internet once a certain amount of time has passed. Fleischer points out that, despite the ethical questions, there is a practical barrier to doing this. Yes, you could have your Facebook page disappear after your death, but not pictures of you people may have reposted or words people have written about you. When you start talking about multiple platforms repurposing a massive amount of information, completely scrubbing the internet of you looks more and more impossible. Even if we could set information to expire, what exactly would that include? Surely, news stories and government records would be archived. If not, would we be doing a huge disservice to future generations by not preserving this information?
Another debate centers around making the internet work like a human brain, to make its memory hazy and ephemeral like ours, gradually letting information dissipate into the abyss. While the idea of computers penning Proustian ruminations on childhood is mildly entertaining to me, it certainly doesn’t sound technologically feasible.
Ultimately it’s hard to think of the greater good when our reputations are on the line. A sociologist in the future might love having access to your 8th grade poetry, but that’s little comfort to you today as a 40 year-old man. Surely, somewhere in heaven, there is an Aztec who is sooo embarrassed about that clay pot that depicts him getting his heart torn out on a sacrificial altar, but to us it’s an invaluable clue to the cultures that came before us. That’s basically where the tension comes from; on a personal level, disclosed information can be quite damaging, but for society as a whole, the more information shared the better.
So, what’s the solution? The flood of personal information hitting the web isn’t likely to stop soon. Instead of having the internet automatically erase our information, the more practical route is probably giving people the tools to control their information from the get-go. There is already software that allows you to choose what companies to sell your personal info to and a movement is underway to allow you to donate your intellectual property after you die. Couple new privacy software with increased awareness that, yes, everyone can see your photos on Facebook and archive your Tweets, and you’ll have less embarrassing information popping up on the web in the first place.
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Diagram: CrazySphinx, Flickr, CC
