Over the weekend an interesting article entitled "The end of forgetting" was 
published as the lead article in this publication.  The author is Jeff Rosen a 
professor of law at an east coast university.  Your can see the full text of the 
article at

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html?
_r=1&ref=magazine

He begins with Mayer-Schonberger's publication "Delete" but he is just using 
this as a starting off point.  Professor Rosen reports that there are a number 
of fascinating ideas, proposals, concerns circulating in response to concerns 
over the loss of forgetting in our virtual world.  Below you will find a few points 
from the article that I found especially intersting.

Rosen suggests that in some ways the dramatic growth of the internet and 
social media undermines the American notion of reinventing one's self which he 
assoicates with the 19th century phrase GTT (gone to Texas) that debtors 
somtimes posted on their front door as they left in the middle of the night.

Rosen quotes from Alex Turk, the French data protection commissioner who 
called for a constittional right to oblivion.  He references two Argentine writers 
who have called for a movement to reinvent forgetting on the internet.

On the technology front companies are starting to market the service of 
sanitizing your internet records.  One such company is ReputationDefender 
formed by a Harvard Law School Grad who thought it unfair that a posting 
made by a 15 year old could be used against him 40 years later.

Rosen also raises some intersting issues of what we may be in store for as we 
shift from web2.0 to web 3.0.  which combine facial recognition software with 
current data aggregation tools.  In response to this situation Professor Zittrain 
who teachers cyberlaw at Harvard has suggested that individuals should be 
allowed to declare reputational bankruptcy once a decade and wipe that onlne 
presence clean.  Zittrain i concerned over the development of tools that will 
assess one's attractiveness and employability with a score similar to a FICO 
score

An interesting technological approach is being developed by researchers at 
the University of Washington who are working on a technology that allows 
users to establish an expiration date.  They hope to do this by encrypting 
data and then at some point destoying the encryption key.

Of course a social media vendor could establish a defacto retention period for 
data.  However, this is not the direction which they are mostly seeking.  
There of course could be regulations on how such information is managed and 
how long it is kept.  

All of this suggests that there is a lot of concern and that this is an area that 
we as records managers should be following.

David Gaynon
Huntington Beach CA
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