Can Web 2.0 Ever Forget?

Excerpt

The Internet is making rapid advances, but its comforts also go hand in hand with a growing threat to the users’ privacy protection. In particular, services subsumed under the heading Web 2.0 – e.g. Social Networks or Microblogs – have aggravated this trend, and continue to pose new and increasingly large challenges for the protection of the private sphere. Risks include the misuse of personal information revealed on the Internet. Furthermore, there is a danger of personal information being misinterpreted to the detriment of the person it refers to. The central source of danger to the private sphere on the Internet emanates from the Internet’s particular characteristics of being decentral and global as well as from the unlimited storage time of any information published on the Internet, coupled with the difficulty of deleting such information (Sterbik-Lamina et al. 2009, pp. 11 ff; Mayer-Schönberger 2008, p. 10). Introducing an expiry date for personal information on the Internet as an interdisciplinary approach addresses the latter aspects, integrating technical, legal, and sociological research results. The initial purpose of the expiry date is to sensitize users to the problem of the lack of protection of the private sphere on the Internet. Such an approach would mean enhancing information with the metadata “expiry date” and remove or anonymize the information after expiration. …