So Much Creating, So Little Destroying!

By Snapchat, Inc.
(https://twitter.com/Snapchat)
[Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons

I felt rather frustrated in my search for data destruction policies in industry or education that would at least attempt to commit to a half-life of some sort for all of the data we are required to share to participate in modern life (see my 6/21/15 “Data Destruction” post). I was initially inspired to learn more about data destruction because in reading and researching for this course I realized that while institutions and corporations are increasingly up front about how they plan to use the data they are requiring us to share with them, I rarely see any indication from them about how long they plan to use it and when we can expect them to stop using it and make sure that it is destroyed. What I found was a great empty space where these policies should exist. On the one hand we have increasingly nervous technology users sharing more and more personal information with institutions and corporations and on the other hand we have a whole industry of data destroyers that serve to help companies erase data from old hardware. But there is a huge communication gap here, data destruction services are focused on serving and protecting the companies that hire them, not on explaining to consumers how the destruction is carried out. And the institutions that collect our data are focused on explaining to us how careful they are being with our information all the while attempting to build trust relationships with us when we, in many cases, would rather know that the relationship will naturally end at some point if we don’t continue to expand it.

This week’s readings however, brought me new inspiration. After reading about the ethical issues surrounding sexting in (Oravec, JA in Heider & Massinari, 2012)  I realized that another perspective from which to consider the ethics of data collection is that of data persistence. Because so much of social media is set up to exponentially expand the reach of any piece of data via sharing, much of the data we share in that way is completely incapable of destruction. It is immortal. While I think there is a difference between data that we choose to share and data that is collected from us, thinking about the persistence of data in social media may help to inform what gives data a life span and how we might structure environments that could limit the persistence of our data and keep it from achieving immortality.

The examples from Oravec (2012) where sexting had terrible consequences like suicide can be seen as a consequence, not of the sexually charged images themselves, but of the persistence of those images once created. If a young, inexperienced person is convinced to create a sexual photograph of themselves and give it to an admirer the consequences of that admirer treating the creator with disrespect and contempt are far less impactful if they are limited to that one copy of the image. In other words, if it can’t be shared, it can’t become a disaster that makes the creator feel powerless and hopeless.  I wonder if we need to change what choices we have about persistence when we create content. What if we could send someone content/images/data that we could tag as non-persistent? What if I could send an image of myself to a friend which when it left my phone was marked as something that I didn’t want copied and that the technology supported that wish? 

We already have applications like Snapchat that purposely limit the persistence of shared photos in terms of time. Snapchat allows users to choose how long an image will last when a receiver opens it, in the range of 1-10 seconds. Expanding this kind of decision-making about the persistence of our creations to the persistence of our data seems like an important next step.

Heider, D. & Massanari, A. L. (Eds.). (2012). Digital Ethics Research & Practice. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing Inc.