In the spring of 2006, a trainee teacher and single mother called Stacy Snyder was summoned by Millersville University in Pennsylvania and told that, despite having passed all her course work and earned all her credits, she would not be awarded a teaching qualification. She was guilty of “behaviour unbecoming of a teacher”.
Snyder, it turned out, had once posted online a photo of herself wearing a pirate’s hat and sipping from a plastic cup. The university authorities argued that the picture might expose potential students to the trauma of seeing a teacher drinking alcohol. Snyder fought the decision but the damage had been done.
Even three years later, type “Stacy Snyder” into Google and the first hit takes you to the innocuous-looking photo.
Snyder is not the only one whose party photos are still knocking around online. Cheap digital storage is tempting companies to back up all their information in huge digital vaults. The rest of us are following suit, “life caching” almost everything about ourselves online via Facebook and photo-sharing sites such as Flickr. And since young people tend to be more trusting of online social networks, they are more likely to throw all their data into the machine. Even those who don’t indulge are vulnerable: the ability to tag photos with people’s names on Flickr, for example, means that someone can use its search function to find a picture of you although you’ve never used the site.
Search engines such as 123people.co.uk specialise in scavenging information about individuals from various places on the net and storing it all in one database.
Now a 43-year-old Austrian academic based in Singapore is campaigning for widespread adoption of a technical fix that could ensure our futures aren’t permanently jeopardised by our pasts.
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, formerly of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, was spurred into action by the realisation that we are quite unconsciously creating a “digital memory that vastly exceeds the capacity of our collective human mind”.
For millenniums, he points out, “humans have remembered the most important elements of their lives and forgotten the rest. With digital technology, we have reversed the process. Today we remember everything and nothing is being forgotten. We have unlearnt one of the most fundamental human traits”.
Our new inability to forget in an age of digital storage, he says, is doing irreparable harm to the time-honoured principle that everyone deserves a second chance, that everything about us should be scrubbed from the record after an appropriate lapse of time.
Mayer-Schönberger is no luddite. He doesn’t advise his students against using social networking sites and the net – they’d take no notice even if he did – but simply warns them that the material they’re uploading might later be used in very different contexts. Already, he points out, companies such as ReputationDefender have sprung up to help individuals to wash away embarrassing details from blogs and online social networks, but that option works only for those who can afford it. “And if that’s the case,” Mayer-Schönberger says, “shouldn’t we equip a larger portion of the population to deal with more effective ways?”
Mayer-Schönberger’s proposed solution, spelt out in his new book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, is simplicity itself. If only we could set any digital information we share or input with a date of expiry, then our storage devices would all have to undergo regular purges of our information. Users of a document, for example, wouldn’t be able to save the file without including an expiration date, thus reminding them to put forgetting back into their daily routines.
At least in technical terms, says Mayer-Schönberger, such systems would be easy to put in place. Our digital cameras already record the time and date at which photos were taken, making them easy to wipe at a specified date. On entering a search query, too, users could be prompted to enter an expiration date, or could select from one already set.
The idea is not wholly fanciful. Some online start-ups, such as the New York file-sharing service drop.io, already allow their customers to share information but with the proviso that the weblink should self-destruct after a prescribed period of time. Even some of the main internet players, says Mayer-Schönberger, realise through market research that people are concerned about this, and are beginning to offer similar services because they want to remain competitive. The search engine Ask.com, for example, now offers users the option to erase their search query history.
Sounds good, but what’s the hitch? Only this: our obsessive-compulsive need to hoard. “It’s a cultural problem more than a technical problem,” admits Mayer-Schönberger. “It will be hard to achieve, but necessary.”
