Do we want an erasable Internet ?

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Heracleum Persicum
Posts: 11574
Joined: Sat Dec 22, 2012 7:38 pm

Do we want an erasable Internet ?

Post by Heracleum Persicum »

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Snapchat


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I understand Snapchat isn't always ephemeral. The app can be hacked to save a person's photos before they expire, and it's possible for law- enforcement authorities to compel the company to release photos stored in its servers. But, crucially, Snapchat automatically deletes photos from its servers after a user has opened them. This is unusual in the tech industry.

In Silicon Valley, data is inviolable; it is close to a religious belief that you can never have too much data, and deleting is often an afterthought. Note that for the first two years of its life, Google's Gmail didn't even have a delete button; the company believed everyone would want to store all email forever. And it wasn't until 2012 that Facebook figured out how to erase photos from its servers after a user pressed delete.

Meanwhile, the entire premise of the field of "big data" is that the more data you have, the more useful your product becomes, because the analysis of lots of user data can itself lead to new insights and features.

It's not all hype, either. There is a good chance you love some of the many tech products that could only have come about because tech companies saved and analyzed your data.

Among these are Google's spell checker, translation service, traffic maps and search suggestions; Amazon.com's AMZN -0.02% media and product recommendations; and Facebook's personalized News Feed and friend suggestions.

Plus, there's all the data that allows for the targeted advertising that pays for free sites. Without saving and analyzing our information, it's hard to see how ad-based Internet giants could exist.

Yet the costs of the Forever Internet sometime seem just as towering as the benefits. Caches of data about you residing out on servers and devices you don't control are a honey pot for the National Security Agency, hackers and your aggrieved ex.

They can create trouble with potential employers, with college admissions officials and with strangers who make snap-judgments about you based on nothing more than an ill-considered, long-forgotten, out-of-context tweet.

In real life, we're used to shifting our personalities from moment to moment and place to place, depending on who we are with and how we feel. Online, because everything is saved and searchable, you've got to constantly police yourself, to create a single, stultifying profile that restricts spontaneous self-expression. Is this really the way we want to live?

Personally, I'm OK with these costs. I love that I can go back years in my Gmail archive and read the emails my wife and I sent to one another when we first met. If we'd courted on Snapchat, that record would have been lost. I also look forward to future nostalgia—to logging into Facebook in 2023 and looking back at family photos from Thanksgiving 2013. That's why, despite finding it fascinating, I rarely use Snapchat. Deletion scares me.

But I can see how for others, Snapchat provides a sense of liberation from the constraints of a permanent record. Of course, we might not have to pick. Big Snapchat-like growth could mean that we'll have a Forever Internet and an Erasable Internet living side by side. Some users mainly will choose apps and services that save our data by default, while others will choose instant deletion. A lot will choose both, depending.

And that is probably how it should be. No one said the Internet had to be forever. This year, Snapchat proved it.

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Doc
Posts: 12562
Joined: Sat Nov 24, 2012 6:10 pm

Re: Do we want an erasable Internet ?

Post by Doc »

There has been talk of erasing all personal information on the internet. Maybe a reset every so many years. But so far it is all talk.
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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