Online privacy is a hot potato.
VC notables Venrock, Kleiner Perkins, and Accel Partners are all betting big bucks on privacy startups. “Privacy is a big issue, and it’s going to get bigger because people realize it can be used against you. That spells market opportunity,” says Ted Schlein of Kleiner Perkins.
Meanwhile, the government is preparing to update existing legislation that protects individuals’ personal data further, meaning someone’s going to get burned. We’re looking at you, Facebook and Google.
But what if the question weren’t whether to completely allow or block certain private information but how to make it fade away over time? Dutch student Harold van Heerde, of
Twente University’s Center for Telematics and Information Technology has a proposal
to increase a person’s privacy on the Internet, using software that automatically “fades” information after a
certain amount of time.
Van Heerde told FastCompany
that, although “traditional databases have not been designed to remove
data in such a way that it gives guarantees that data has been indeed
irreversibly removed, we developed a prototype showing that it is
feasible to implement the techniques.” Would Facebook submit to such a system? And what about its 500
million or so users?
“Facebook messages are only relevant from a
user’s point of view for a relatively short amount of time. How many
users will search or look for messages a friend posted months ago? For
Facebook, this data is much more relevant, since they can build
profiles of their users to make money out of it. So Facebook will be
very afraid that they might lose their business if this data will be
destroyed.”
