[LINK] Technology that exposes your dirty linen

[Tom Worthington]

At 12:06 PM 10/01/2008, Roger Clarke wrote:
>... reminded me of this proposal for data self-destruction:
>
>Escaping the data panopticon: Prof says computers must learn to "forget"
>By Nate Anderson | Published: May 09, 2007 - 08:52AM CT
>http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070509-escaping-the-data-panopticon-teaching-computers-to-forget.html 
>...
>
>... Essentially, this means that all collected data is tagged with a 
>new piece of metadata that defines when the information should expire. ...

Yes, the old ways of cleaning out data, such as fire, flood or 
earthquake, will not work as well in the online distributed 
environment. Perhaps rather than a fixed disposal date, as this 
article proposes, the data could have its own "social network" to 
work out when it should be deleted. The system would work out how 
many degrees of separation there are between different data elements. 
When an element of data becomes very remote from everything else it 
is a candidate for deletion. The same approach could be used for 
automatically granting access to data: data near your data is likely 
to be something you need to know.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, ANU