June 16, 2010 by Mark Isle
Remember when you were a child, and you wrote in the sand on a beach? You’d take a stick or spade, and write your name and details, and in a matter of hours your information was washed away back to smooth beach, with no record of your presence.
This concept is now being taken and applied to online data, a new research project reports. The research suggests that our online privacy could be enhanced if there were a way of digitally removing or erasing the information we submit online.
Dr Harold van Heerde is a Dutch IT researcher who has been seeking ways to degrade information that we input in to sites, to prevent internet site owners from retaining our personal information and using it for deception, criminal means or other untoward behaviour. Van Heerde is of the opinion that we will gradually be able to change the information we input online, to stop the influx of personal detail that is housed about individual on the net.
This measure will guard against accidental disclosure, in addition to addressing some of the weak elements of online security which currently compromise our online safety, he suggests.
“There are so many weak points in security that you can never be sure that your data is safe,” said Dr van Heerde.
Dr van Heerde hails from the Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT), at Twente University. He has pioneered research which examined the way in which we input data online, and how databases manage this information, both about customers and surfers.
The way in which databases are currently managed enable organisations to house details about consumers, which make it tempting for them to utilise this information to promote products. This makes it difficult to safeguard ourselves when information is accidentally leaked online through human error.
“People make mistakes, people can be bribed,” he has stated. “You cannot protect this data, you cannot be sure it’s not been disclosed, privacy policies are simply too weak.” Van Heerde is of the opinion that all information submitted by people should be subject to contractual obligations which provide an element of governance over how, and when, it is used for commercial purposes.
His ideas for remedying the situation include using generic location information rather than addresses, and replacing specifics with more general values which still provide an effective indication of consumer profiles and preferences. This means that our data will fade, being replace instead by more general information which will protect our privacy as online consumers. Just as when we wrote our name in the sand, the online environment will soon allow our details to fade instead of being carved in stone.
Related posts:
