Will your digital butlers betray you?

ABSTRACT

The cost of data storage is now so low that there is little necessity ever to delete anything. The consequence is <i>denied oblivion</i>---digital systems that remember forever and can be data-mined retroactively, years after the event, ignoring any privacy promise under which the original data may have been acquired.

Even for systems under your own control, though, the situation is alarming. As your capacious digital butlers faithfully collect as much data as possible about you, your private information is increasingly likely to become compromised. New solutions are needed. But technical countermeasures alone are not the whole story.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY
      K.4.1 Public Policy Issues
          Subjects: Privacy

General Terms:
Security

Keywords:
data mining, denied oblivion