geistlogistic

“We may be finished with the past, but the past is not finished with us.” This very famous quote from Paul Thomas Anderson film “Magnolia” is more true today than ever before. When you delete data from a web page nowadays you never know if it really disappeared from the web. Therefore, people and esp. younger ones are increasingly reminded to take care what kind of information they post on the Web because it is a public room.

The wish to add expire dates to data to get control over the personal information is heavily discussed on the Web and in several PhD thesis. A computer scientists from the University of Saarbruecken, Germany – Michael Backes Prof. on  Information Security and Cryptography developed  the first system that supports people to add an expiration date to any digital content. The system is based on a combination of  encryption and captacha technology that triggers the data and deletes it after the deadline. It is the first technical solution for these kind of problem, but I have my doubts that social networks like facebook will adapt to it.

Further information can be found here:

• a description of the underlying problem,
• how to use X-pire!
• what can X-pire! guarantee and what can’t it guarantee
• who benefits from X-pire!
• New Facebook Photo Protector Allows You to Be Ridiculous Online–and Then Erase the Images (fastcompany.com)

Tags: data degradation, Technology/Internet

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 25th, 2011 at 4:14 pm and is filed under datatel, privacy protection, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.