RoelThe first international symposium kicks off with some intensive talks on digital rights, society and the internet. Fasten your seatbelts for some sharp statements on the first festival day in Lentos Museum.
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger
People are able to remember, and they are able to forget. The case was, that recalling a memory was taking more effort than forgetting one. Nowadays, technology has changed that the other way around. Data storage has become really cheap, and new technologies are allowing us to build indexing software better than ever. We are storing all the pictures our digital camera makes, even the bad ones. Google stores all our search-queries we ever made, and millions of security-cameras are recording our movements in public space. Our society is making it harder every day to forget things. Everything is being recorded and stored for later use, but how does that affect our being? Our lives? Our privacy?
Forgetting was the norm, remembering was the exception. In the end we are storing too much memories, too much information. Actually, this threatens our privacy in a semantic manner. For example; in 1920, The Netherlands were keeping track of exceptional information concerning citizens. Information such as country of birth, religion, birthplace, et cetera. In a way, this helped the society to serve citizens. But at the same time, this is a real treasure of information, when you place it in another context. When the second world war started, and The Netherlands were taken over by the nazi-regime, the first thing they got hold of was this database, because they could easily filter out the jews and deport them. Because of this, the nazi's were able to deport the most jews than in any other country.
This example illustrates an extreme case of the negative side of dataretention. But, this problem may be closer than you think. When you realise that Google is recording every query you do, Amazon is recording every product you considered buying, when your favorite airline is recording every journey you make, even the ones you didn't book(!), what is left of your privacy? Is that data still yours? What if you don't want your information in the hands of that company?
Imagine on how many servers there's data of you sitting around. Just sitting and waiting, untill someone needs that information. Wouldn't you like to know about that? This is normally not withing your reach or authority, because it's not your server, not your service, not your company and so on. But it IS your data. It is YOUR information. So what if we propose a law, which says that a company or authority has to ask or inform you, before it is allowed to access your information. In fact, why doesn't it work this way right now?
We need an 'information ecology'. An environment which forces us to handle these insane amount of information with more care and more important: more caution. We need to enforce greater forces and authorities to get the right to access your data, before they actually access it. And as a next step, we need to introduce an expiry date. An expiry date on information; states Viktor. "Milk has an expiry date right? So why can't we use that on information too?" (Okay I know, milk is still not digital, but it's a nice example, you'll understand later on) Imagine you can control the expiry date on your information. On data that is yours. Especially personal data like date of birth, your social security number, your address, your sex, et cetera. That way, you can control all by yourself what a company does with your data, and for how long they have access to it. That way, you can even manage to keep your harddrive clean. You can control for how long you want to keep your data. Imagine you download pictures from your digital camera, and you set the expiry date. You do want to keep your wedding pictures for quite a few years, don't you? But that silly party in the pub yesterday, you'd keep them for a year or two.
Technologically speaking, this is not hard. But ethical and practical, I think this is fairly impossible. It sounds like a nice idea, but so does DRM. And so does RFID. It would be a matter of time before consumers (yes, just us, not only hackers) have access to tools that would allow us to moderate those expiry dates on data. It would just be a matter of time, before a company decides they would like to keep all their costumers' data, for marketing purposes. In the end, we became very good in stretching expiry dates, just have a close look in your local supermarket, and find a can of SPAM...
