Moeten we het hongerige web bederfelijke data voeren?

Met schaamte zie ik wel eens stukjes van mezelf op internet voorbijkomen, geschreven in een vlaag van boosheid. Stukjes die niet al te vleiend zijn over mensen die ik nu, jaren later, in mijn werk als journalist weer tegenkom. Soms als ik een interviewafspraak maak, hoop ik dat de persoon in kwestie mij niet googled. Sommige informatie zou je van het web willen wissen.

Dat kan niet. Eens geschreven blijft geschreven. Wat je weggeeft aan het hongerige web, krijg je nooit meer terug. Vorige week stond er een fraai verhaal in het New York Times Magazine over dit onderwerp. ‘Privacyprofessor’ Jeffrey Rosen analyseerde daarin hoe een wereld met een olifantgeheugen eruit ziet. Die wereld is niet fraai. Jeugdzondes die je maar blijven achtervolgen. Reputaties die maar niet opgepoetst kunnen worden. Online informatie die steeds meer jouw online status bepaalt, terwijl je zelf steeds minder grip hebt op welke informatie op het web verschijnt.

Je kunt daar vanalles tegen doen. Een censuurknop, zoals minister Hirsch Ballin wil (geen goed idee). Je kunt naar Reputation Defender stappen, een bedrijf dat het web probeert te schonen – uiteraard tegen flinke kosten. Je kunt reguleren. Je laptop dichtklappen en voortaan brieven gaan schrijven.

Maar ook techniek kan helpen. In het verhaal wordt een prachtig voorbeeld genoemd, dat erg tot de verbeelding spreekt: je kunt data ook laten bederven. Hier de passage:

Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story “Funes, the Memorious,” describes a young man who, as a result of a riding accident, has lost his ability to forget. Funes has a tremendous memory, but he is so lost in the details of everything he knows that he is unable to convert the information into knowledge and unable, as a result, to grow in wisdom. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, in “Delete,” uses the Borges story as an emblem for the personal and social costs of being so shackled by our digital past that we are unable to evolve and learn from our mistakes. After reviewing the various possible legal solutions to this problem, Mayer-Schönberger says he is more convinced by a technological fix: namely, mimicking human forgetting with built-in expiration dates for data. He imagines a world in which digital-storage devices could be programmed to delete photos or blog posts or other data that have reached their expiration dates, and he suggests that users could be prompted to select an expiration date before saving any data.

This is not an entirely fanciful vision. Google not long ago decided to render all search queries anonymous after nine months (by deleting part of each Internet protocol address), and the upstart search engine Cuil has announced that it won’t keep any personally identifiable information at all, a privacy feature that distinguishes it from Google. And there are already small-scale privacy apps that offer disappearing data. An app called TigerText allows text-message senders to set a time limit from one minute to 30 days after which the text disappears from the company’s servers on which it is stored and therefore from the senders’ and recipients’ phones. (The founder of TigerText, Jeffrey Evans, has said he chose the name before the scandal involving Tiger Woods’s supposed texts to a mistress.)

Expiration dates could be implemented more broadly in various ways. Researchers at the University of Washington, for example, are developing a technology called Vanish that makes electronic data “self-destruct” after a specified period of time. Instead of relying on Google, Facebook or Hotmail to delete the data that is stored “in the cloud” — in other words, on their distributed servers — Vanish encrypts the data and then “shatters” the encryption key. To read the data, your computer has to put the pieces of the key back together, but they “erode” or “rust” as time passes, and after a certain point the document can no longer be read. Tadayoshi Kohno, a designer of Vanish, told me that the system could provide expiration dates not only for e-mail but also for any data stored in the cloud, including photos or text or anything posted on Facebook, Google or blogs. The technology doesn’t promise perfect control — you can’t stop someone from copying your photos or Facebook chats during the period in which they are not encrypted. But as Vanish improves, it could bring us much closer to a world where our data didn’t linger forever.

Kohno told me that Facebook, if it wanted to, could implement expiration dates on its own platform, making our data disappear after, say, three days or three months unless a user specified that he wanted it to linger forever. It might be a more welcome option for Facebook to encourage the development of Vanish-style apps that would allow individual users who are concerned about privacy to make their own data disappear without imposing the default on all Facebook users.

Tot slot nog een interview met Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, die een boek over het geheugen van het web schreef, Delete.