Virtue of Forgetting

In these days of rapid technological advancement and many tools to exchange information, the way how to share and to record moments and dialogues has become easy, particularly with the help of the internet. Nowadays is possible to keep all conversations, photos, videos and documents stored on a computer and, especially, in virtual places, such as email, blogs and virtual communities. To have access to all information whenever you want and with the speed of a click is very practical. However, is really necessary to keep all that content stored? Can you have privacy uploading your "life" on the Internet?

Some of these questions are discussed in the book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age written by Professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, who is director of the Information and Innovation Policy Research Centre at the National University of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

In Delete he is talking about how the ability to "remember" has grown in the digital age. As well as, he makes us think about how "to forget" is important and, also, is a natural process of humanity. One of the issues presented for him is when our information can't be literally deleted from the Internet because other search sites had already tracked and stored our information. For some people this may not be a big problem, but for others it is totally a threat to privacy. In the book he cites two examples of people who have been harmed by having personal information exposed on the network. First example involves a teacher, Stacy Snyder, who was in training and had her certification denied because one of her photo called drunk pirate on MySpace, that was interpreted for her supervisors as drunkenness. The second example is about a Canadian psychotherapist, Andrew Feldmar, who was forbidden to entry into the USA in 2006, because his name was found in a online journal about his experiences, in the 1960s, with LSD. Faced with this problem Mayer-Schönberger suggests some solutions, among them, establish a deadline for information on internet: expiration dates. We don't need to have certain information in the network forever.

This issue was discussed in class and, also, a survey was conducted whether is it a big problem or not? The result is 18 people think that it is a big challenge to face in the digital age. 12 people think that it is not a big problem. In my opinion, when I read Delete reviews I thought that it was a problem of privacy. You are who can decide what you want to publish of your life. However, when at class the professor and some classmates started to talk about Google and other devices that can track and store all of our information including emails and conversations, I started getting worried. I don't know if the government can ensure that companies comply with "expiration dates", if it would be the best solution. Whether this is true or not, I'd rather not risk it and start to think better before publish anything about me on the internet.