Chris Anderson argues in a recent Wired article that the reduction of storage cost has created a new tech paradigm. We no longer need to worry about limiting people’s personal storage of digital stuff — the cost of managing quotas is more expensive than the cost of adding more storage. And search technologies make mining this information easier than content management hierarchies. From a technical standpoint this may be true — but is access to everything you’ve ever created really such a good idea for society, business or personal purposes? Aren’t many things better forgotten once their usefulness has passed? Maybe the default for social media should be to VANISH.
Vanish is a project out of University of Washington, and it adds encoding to your data that expires after a set time period. While still experimental, the process reminds me of some copy protection schemes where a file will ‘time bomb’ after a set period and render the file unusable. The files themselves don’t disappear, but they can no longer be read. Something along these lines would make sense for social media, email, and other digital pieces of our lives. In the real world, “Time heals all wounds.” Graceful forgetting would be a benefit in the digital world as well. And, by the way, it also could help reduce vulnerability to security hacks — many personal attacks take advantage of internet-based personal data.
This Message will Self-Destruct: New Tool Makes Online Postings Disappear
On the internet, data lives forever. …That may be about to change, though, thanks to a new tool created by researchers at the University of Washington. Called “Vanish,” the system places a time limit on any message posted to any web service through a web browser.
Vanish: Enhancing the Privacy of the Web with Self-Destructing Data
Vanish is a research system designed to give users control over the lifetime of personal data stored on the web or in the cloud. Specifically, all copies of Vanish encrypted data — even archived or cached copies — will become permanently unreadable at a specific time, without any action on the part of the user or any third party or centralized service.
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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