Comments on: the internet: like an electronic elephant

By: Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger

Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger — Sun, 13 May 2007 03:26:16 +0000

You seem to suggest that my proposal is similar to IP secured by DRM. It seems that you haven’t actually looked at my paper. In the paper I suggest that a DRM-like approach (as Lessig has made in Code 2.0) would be overkill. What I desire is not perfect solution, just a shift in defaults that makes users think again about the choice of forgetting.
I encourage you to read the paper – it’s a free download, including from my website, and I think addresses some of the concerns you seem to have.
In contrast your solution (cognitively accepting the fact that we are transparent and thus weigh things differently) depends on our brains ability to adapt – not something that cognitive scientists have much hope in I am afraid, espcially since biologically we are wired to forget.
Kind regards,
VMS

By: Kriston

Kriston — Fri, 11 May 2007 17:15:13 +0000

I think this is an argument for less control. (Hi, I just read History of Sexuality. That should be transparently obvious when I say that inventing new ways to not talk about sex when we're talking about sex seems like a poor investment of technology and more than a little pointless—surely the Internet puts us over the event horizon for total transparency in society.) The kids in their infinite online folly are going to grow up to be adults with readily searchable closets, skeletons open to all. Doesn't that promise a society in which Googling a prospective employee's name is pointless? The only thing we can do is believe it when we say that it's relatively harmless, full stop.

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 11 May 2007 15:23:36 +0000

I think this is just an argument for finer-grained access permissions on our online communications. Livejournal does this pretty well. Not only can you do “friends-only” posts, but you can also restrict individual posts to subsets of your friends. It requires a bit of set-up on the front end to categorize your friends, but once you’ve done that, it’s easy to do a post and mark it as “all friends,” or “college friends,” or “DC friends,” or whatever.

By: tom

tom — Thu, 10 May 2007 18:40:34 +0000

I completely agree. It’s relatively harmless now, I suppose, but I think that’s largely because Facebook is waiting to be acquired. At that point their new owner will want to monetize the site, and it’ll be filled with spam the way that MySpace is. And at that point, who knows what’ll happen to your personal info? They’ve already shown that they’re not squeamish about making radical changes to users’ level of exposure on the site (as shown by that whole feed business).

By: Becks

Becks — Thu, 10 May 2007 17:59:21 +0000

If anything, I’d think this is an argument for blogs and things you have control over instead of things like Facebook. We wouldn’t have been able to do a fast mass redaction when someone threatened to out FL, for example, if we didn’t have direct access to our databases and hadn’t explicitly set our pages not to be cached.