Expiration date

Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, is the author of "Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age." He is the director of the Information and Innovation Policy Research Center at the National University of Singapore and a faculty affiliate of the Belfer Center of Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He holds degrees in law and economics from Salzburg, Harvard and the London School of Economics.

Deutsche Welle: You argue that the fact that the Internet doesn't allow us to forget anything anymore is a huge problem. Why?

Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger: By keeping information accessible for a very long period of time we will enter a society where what he have said today or yesterday may be held against us in the future. Not just in a week or two, but in a year or perhaps a decade. As this happens, it would also be taken out of context. So we will be confronted with our utterances online that we uttered today in a particular context 10 years down the road when the world has moved on and much of our preferences and values might have changed.

That's a huge problem. The traditional response to that problem has been to recommend to people to be self-censoring their utterances. President Obama famously said to students that they shouldn't post anything on Facebook or other social networking sites if they feared that this could be held against them in the future.

I think that's the wrong approach. If we start self censoring ourselves in what we do online we would not only impoverish the open robust debate that we need in a democratic society, but we would also shortchange the powerful tools online that are available for us to peer-produce knowledge and to share information.

Do the negative effects of remembering really outweigh the benefits that we can store and save not just personal, but also cultural information that would have been lost earlier?

The important thing is that all through human history forgetting was easier for us and remembering was hard. Today this has become reversed: The problem is that today remembering is so easy and forgetting so hard that for all practical purposes individuals rarely have a meaningful choice anymore in what is being remembered and for how long. I do want our society and us individually to again have a meaningful choice about what we want to remember and for how long.

There are certain things that we ought to remember and that we must remember, but that's a choice we will make. Currently we are living in a world where our digital devices by default store everything that they capture and because it takes an enormous amount of time and effort we just don't go through our digital photographs anymore and decide which ones we like and which ones we don't. We just store everything on the hard disk. The default is storage, the default is agglomeration of memory.

You propose a simple solution to the problem of eternal storage: an expiration date for information. Can you explain how this could work?

Expiration dates for information are very straightforward and easy. I suggest that just like a filename we assign to a file that we save - a text document or a photo or a video - an expiration date. Whether its two days into the future or whether its 200 years into the future, when the expiration date is reached the file is deleted. We should be able to change the expiration date in any form or shape we want even after we have selected it if we change our mind.

The important thing is not the expiration date as a technical solution. The importance is that by entering the expiration date for files and information, we as human beings are confronted with the question of how long this information is going to be relevant. And this brings back the timeline of information, the temporal nature of information, that most information is contextual and loses its value over time and therefore its relevance.

To be effective such an expiration date would have to be agreed upon on an international level. Who could set such a standard in your opinion?

I think that the internet is a perfect example for ad-hoc standards and ad-hoc protocols that have emerged and where companies and organizations have signed up to it. Expiration date information is meta-data. We can have ad-hoc standardization relatively easily.

If for instance Amazon, Google and Flickr get together and set a standard perhaps together with Microsoft, then other companies and organizations will follow suit. This is not about a 100 percent solution, but about a solution that takes care of 70 or 80 percent of the problem. If the major providers of Internet services would adhere to the principles of expiration dates we would have made a gigantic step forward toward a solution.

An expiration date would have tremendous implications on governments and businesses who want to mine the increasing amount of information available for political, security and economic purposes. Do you see any chance that they are interested at all in an expiration date?

I don't see it that binary. In fact I see the expiration date as a way by which the information quality of many Internet services could improve. Take Amazon's book recommendation as an example. If Amazon has many old book purchases of myself that they factor into my book recommendations, the recommendations may be based on interests and preferences of my past that are no longer relevant for me in the present.

I might have been interested in travelling to Bali, but now I have been to Bali so I have no interest in books about Bali anymore. The quality of information that Amazon and others use and base their recommendations on could be improved if I tell them when the information that they have about me is no longer relevant. Expiration dates do exactly that.

So if I purchase a book and at the same time tell Amazon please only use this book purchase information for the next two months to make recommendations about other purchases to me, the quality of the book recommendations that Amazon provides for me would actually increase. The same is true for search requests on Google and with many other information providers on the Internet that base their services on the high quality of the information that they use to calculate it.

You have a personal website and are active on Facebook and Linkedin. How do you handle your personal information on the internet?

I tend to be quite careful in what I share on the Internet and I hate myself for that. I hate myself for having to be self-censoring when in fact I would rather be able to share much more information with others. So I would like to live in a world in which I could share information with some strings attached, particularly with a forgetting string.

Interview: Michael Knigge
Editor: Rob Mudge