The importance of forgetting

Apparently privacy isn’t dead, it’s just a bit confused.

One of the main threats to privacy is the web’s terrible capacity to remember.

As Bruce Schneier says, in one of the clearest reflections on the problem we’re going to face:

Society works precisely because conversation is ephemeral; because people forget, and because people don’t have to justify every word they utter.

So the key, it seems, is forgetting.

Like what Google is doing by giving up on keeping historical logs for its Google Latitude service. The police can’t ask Google to hand over the information needed to determine whether a person took part in a political rally in a given public square.

This is interesting, and it’s a good thing. These new “networked social services” must have the ability to forget. It’s a good way to protect people’s privacy.