|
Escaping the data panopticon:
Prof says computers must learn to "forget"
Nate Anderson
Ars
Technica
Thursday May 10, 2007
The rise of fast processors and cheap storage means that remembering,
once incredibly difficult for humans, has become simple. Viktor
Mayer-Schönberger, a professor in Harvard's JFK School of Government,
argues that this shift has been bad for society, and he calls instead
for a new era of "forgetfulness."
Mayer-Schönberger lays out his idea in a faculty research
working paper called "Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in
the Age of Ubiquitous Computing," where he describes his plan
as reinstating "the default of forgetting our societies have
experienced for millennia."
Why would we want our machines to "forget"? Mayer-Schönberger
suggests that we are creating a Benthamist panopticon by archiving
so many bits of knowledge for so long. The accumulated weight of
stored Google searches, thousands of family photographs, millions
of books, credit bureau information, air travel reservations, massive
government databases, archived e-mail, etc., can actually be a detriment
to speech and action, he argues.
"If whatever we do can be held against us years later, if
all our impulsive comments are preserved, they can easily be combined
into a composite picture of ourselves," he writes in the paper.
"Afraid how our words and actions may be perceived years later
and taken out of context, the lack of forgetting may prompt us to
speak less freely and openly."
In other words, it threatens to make us all politicians.
In contrast to omnibus data protection legislation, Mayer-Schönberger
proposes a combination of law and software to ensure that most data
is "forgotten" by default. A law would decree 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." Essentially, this means that all collected data
is tagged with a new piece of metadata that defines when the information
should expire.
In practice, this would mean that iTunes could only store buying
data for a limited time, a time defined by law. Should customers
explicitly want this time extended, that would be fine, but people
must be given a choice. Even data created by users—digital
pictures, for example—would be tagged by the cameras that
create them to expire in a year or two; pictures that people want
to keep could simply be given a date 10,000 years in the future.
Mayer-Schönberger wants to help us avoid becoming digital
pack rats, and he wants to curtail the amount of time that companies
and governments can collate data about users and citizens "just
because they can." Whenever there's a real need to do so, data
can be retained, but setting the default expiration date forces
organizations to decide if they truly do need to retain that much
data forever.
It's a "modest" proposal, according to Mayer-Schönberger,
but he recognizes that others may see it as "simplistic"
or "radical." To those who feel like they are living in
a panopticon, it might feel more like a chink in the wall through
which fresh air blows.
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
|
