To Be Preserved Forever
To Be Preserved Forever
June 13, 2007: Viktor Mayer- Schönberger has compared Google’s ethos with the KGB’s motto applied to information on its political prisoners: ??????? ????? (to be preserved for ever)
Mayer Schönberger, a Harvard University academic made the comparison in his paper released in April 2007 titled, “Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing,” published in April 2007
For Mayer-Schönberger, the comparison comes as he acknowledges the economics of digital information in a world where storage is cheap and we have a tendency to keep everything. We keep bad photos because it’s cheaper to store them than sift through them, or keep our documents for disaster recovery purposes. Likewise, “Google saves every search query, and millions of video surveillance cameras retain our movements.”
But to avoid what Mayer-Schönberger sees as our world’s slide towards Jeremy Bentham’s “panoptic prison” (where a central watchtower allowed guards to potentially be watching prisoners, while prisoners do not know if they are being watched), his paper proposes not new legislation to protect privacy, but that we relearn the art of forgetting.
How we “unlearned to forget”, hypothesises Mayer-Schönberger, has occurred through the decreasing cost of storage and new found powers in access and search. Through this we have been able to change the choices we face between retention and destruction. “The costliness of continuous preservation forced us to carefully consider the trade-offs of retention and deletion. Only records viewed as important and valuable were kept,” he says.
“Today, however,” argues Mayer-Schönberger, “retention of digital data is (relatively) easy and cheap. As a consequence, and absent other considerations, we keep rather than delete it. This is the central point: In our analog past, the default was to discard rather than preserve; today the default is to retain.”
The same tendencies have occurred in business, however more savvy operators understand that to keep everything is not such a good idea from a regulatory point of view. For example, keeping financial information beyond the mandatory 5 years is a poor strategy for an individual. If an individual is audited by the ATO beyond this period, that information can be used against them. If they had destroyed it, it wouldn’t. The challenge for business is knowing exactly where that information resides and how many copies of it exists on the network.
But the problem with privacy laws like those in Europe’s data protection laws, which stipulate that generally personal data can only be collected, processed and store with consent argues Mayer-Schönberger is that “it creates completely new structures, process, institutions, and rights that are rarely used.”
The solution? Based on Lawrence Lessig’s response of “Law and Code”, Mayer-Schönberger suggests we adopt a “mechanism mix”. That is, enact legislation that grants individuals rights over their personal information, provide a technical infrastructure to trade personal information at low transactional costs. This would help establish a market where individuals can set a price on their personal information and decide whether to trade that.
Mayer-Schönberger’s own proposal is as follows:
“I propose that we shift the default when storing personal information back to where it has been for millennia, from remembering forever to forgetting over time. I suggest that we achieve this reversal with a combination of law and software… [M]andate that those who create software that collects and stores data build into their code not only the ability to forget with time, but make such forgetting the default. The technical principle is similarly simple: Data is associated with meta-data that defines how long the underlying personal information ought to be stored. Once data has reached its expiry date, it will be deleted automatically by software…”