Babbage | Online privacy

Relearning to forget

As digital footprints become easier to garner, individuals have the right to know what others know about them—and to delete their personal data as they see fit

By L.M.

ON JANUARY 25th the European Commission formally unveiled an overhaul of the continent's data-protection rules. The proposal for a snappily titled "Regulation on the Protection of Individuals with Regard to the Processing of Personal Data and on the Free Movement of Such Data” is unlikely to become a bestseller. Yet the 117-page booklet might affect every one of the European Union's 500m citizens, every one of its businesses, and many more beyond. It is “the biggest, most impactful piece of legislation that the European Union could produce unless they developed tax powers,” says Joe McNamee of European Digital Rights, a lobby group.

The law has two main goals: to give individuals greater control over their personal information and to make it easier for companies to do business in Europe (see this week's print edition). Perhaps more importantly, it also, for the first time, gives Europeans what has been dubbed the “right to be forgotten”. This would require data-hoarding organisations, from web firms to universities, to own up to an individual what information they have on him, and to erase it if he asks them to.

Crucially, the proposed regulation should make it easier for the relevant national and EU agencies to press organisations to comply with a time limit on how long they may store data before having to ask for permission to hold on to it for longer. Such a sunset clause, akin to but the opposite of declassifying of government records, would make people pause to think about whether it makes sense for data to remain in the handlers' hands, says Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor of internet governance at Oxford University and author of “Delete: the Virtue of Forgetting in a Digital Age”.

The requirement need not be set in stone; an individual might decide to extend the life of his data, just as certain aspects of government remain secret much longer than others. But having to do so actively will remind him that the data are there. And that there are a lot of them.

Cheap digital storage, ubiquitous connectivity and oodles of processing power have changed the way people think about memory. Remembering is replacing forgetting as human beings' default setting. In 1980 one megabyte of storage cost $500. Now Amazon sells hard drives a million times bigger for a little over $100. Sorting through the myriad holiday snaps to bin the rubbish ones is tedious; easier to keep the lot.

Unlike biological memory, though, the digitally augmented sort can be tapped by others leaving the rememberer none the wiser. Search companies routinely store users' queries. Social networks record interactions between people. Ad clicks are logged. Cookies track individuals' paths through the online wilderness. As a consequence, online data-mongers have unprecendented access to what are, in effect, the thoughts of hundreds of millions of consumers and citizens. They know more about people than people do about themselves. You will have trouble recalling your online searches from a few months back; Google won't.

This can, of course, be a boon to individuals. It lets them avoid continuous online-form filling or barrages of irrelevant ads, which are replaced by those tailored to their tastes. All this saves precious time and makes for a more seamless and pleasant online experience. And indeed, some people may decide that they value convenience over confidentiality. But in a liberal society those who plump for privacy have every right to expect others, including data handlers, to respect their choice.

The commission's proposal faces several hurdles. It may impose an onerous burden on companies: after all, it is next to impossible to rid the web completely of a piece of information: some digital ripples will inevitably remain. It is also often hard to say where one man's data end and another's begin. And even though the regulation explicitly exempts journalism, crooks and other miscreants may still try to invoke it to have their name struck from unfavourable online coverage—it is not always clear what counts as reporting on the internet. Some of these rough edges may yet be ironed out, though. Having figured out how to remember nearly everything, it is about time people relearned how to forget.

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