Expiration Data

Expiration Data

Can you imagine if every inane conversation you've had over cocktails was archived? Every attempted bon mot? Every AOL ? Every rant on anything, even if you later amended or reversed your opinion?

Originally shared by Andreas Schou

Obliquely, because this does relate to my day job:

Societies often conclude that certain facts about the outside world are constants. The police cannot see through walls. Maintaining social ties is difficult over a certain distance. Strong inferences cannot be made from trails of weak evidence. The past is transient, not permanent.

When those putative constants become variables, the whole system surrounding them needs to be renegotiated, and it is not entirely clear where the new barriers -- policy barriers, not technical barriers -- should stand. It is in some ways impossible to recover the full value of the technical impossibilities which propped up large swaths of our culture, but it isn't entirely so. 

As people concerned about privacy, we're still fumbling toward a complete vocabulary to describe what has happened over the past twenty years. Describing conduct as "public" is not always fully capable of alleviating privacy concerns -- what about the frictionless way in which the past has become discoverable to anyone who cares to look? To what extent should we simulate the technical barriers which implicitly created a horizon of discoverability? Should we at all?

We don't have answers to that yet. We won't for quite some time, and I doubt that we will ever fully agree. 
http://www.theawl.com/2015/08/time-is-a-privacy-setting

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