Making personal data fade away to protect net privacy

LONDON - A method that makes personal information of netizens fade away online over time - just letting the details gradually disappear from view - can be formulated, according to a researcher.

Harold van Heerde of the Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT) at the University of Twente, Denmark, feels this would drastically reduce privacy-related problems while ensuring that the information still retains its usefulness to some extent.

Internet users post personal details and photos in profiles on social networking websites such as Facebook, Hyves and LinkedIn, and are often blissfully unaware of how such information can be used or abused.

van Heerde argues that the focus on security alone is too narrow. He even goes so far as to claim that sound security is more or less impossible to achieve.

He is, therefore, advocating a method whereby information is allowed to fade away over time “like footprints in the sand”.

This will allow the service provider who needs to use the information to make use of it for some time, while ensuring that useful details will no longer be accessible to those who might want to abuse them.

This would entail making prior agreements about how long information should be kept and how quickly it should be allowed to fade away. The key is to strike a balance between the usefulness of the data and the length of time for which it is stored.

van Heerde insists that this calls for a whole new approach to databases: current systems are optimised for long-term data storage and access, not for allowing data to simply fade away.

That is why new techniques are needed to allow data to be efficiently and irretrievably erased, a University of Twente release said.