Digital legacy: Teaching the net to forget

[qubit]

"The internet's not written in pencil, Mark. It's written in ink." So says a character in The Social Network, the biopic of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The implication: be careful what you post online, because you can't erase it.

Some researchers want to build forgetfulness into the material we share on the internet by such technical means as files with expiry dates.

Yet in theory we can control over what we leave on the internet without ambitious technical fixes like this. We just need to adopt some practices that have been around since as early as the 1980s.

Is building in forgetfulness a good idea?

New Scientist

[Frick]

I don't know really. IRL I write everything with ink because I feel the things I write are kinda... important in a way. Everything are expressions of the moment it's created so in a way it would be removing a legacy. I think no. I like the idea that it's all there if you're willing to dig for it.

The problem is that people don't have any clues about privacy and what to share and what to keep to themselves/keep irl. But I think that will change in the future. The internet is still pretty young.

[Kreij]

No. Building in forgetfullness is a bad idea.
People should consider the ramifications of what they send out to the rest of the world before they hit the "send" button.
Otherwise they will never learn.

Whether it's a good idea or not, I don't see how it could ever be enforced. Anybody can crawl any website and archive what they find, so until we have one world govt, there's no way to enforce it.

[wolf]

Originally Posted by Kreij

No. Building in forgetfullness is a bad idea.
People should consider the ramifications of what they send out to the rest of the world before they hit the "send" button.
Otherwise they will never learn.

Big +1 on that, exercise some frikken caution before posting pictures, information, hec even an email. some people that upload/post willy-nilly deserve to end up on 4chan.

[wahdangun]

I think the most important thing is to educate people to be more responsible on the internet than making "forgetfull" internet. Maybe there should make a new class about internet responsibility in school?

[micropage7]

i just wanna say if you forget something you couldnt learn a thing from it.
but to keep all, i dont think we could handle such a much much data
just make sure you write something that good and could influence anyone to be a better one.
they dont need to know who you are but they should know what you have shared
edit: i guess its more like philosophy than just techno thing