Expiration dates on digital information?

Clicking around on the DCC-inspired Digital Curation blog led me to an interesting article from the Times Online called “Google Must Let Us Forget” which talks about life caching and a book by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger titled Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. This article discusses a downside to putting your digital information online – the fact that sometimes it is difficult to get rid of the information once it has been released into the wilds of the internet. Mayer-Schönberger offers an interesting solution to this potential problem by suggesting that there be a set expiration date on digital information, after which the information would be purged by storage devices.

Google, the Internet Archive, and other places on the internet, manage to capture so much information and keep it around, maybe much longer than those who first posted the information intended. The Neil Beagrie reading from this week mentioned life caching (the capturing and sharing of life memories online) and the problems individuals are having with protecting privacy and organizing the ever-increasing amount of digital information. And we’ve been talking about digital preservation and reading about all the issues that come with trying to keep digital data usable and preserved as technology changes. With all of that in mind, the notion of setting any digital information that we put out or take in with an expiration date intrigues me. The article mostly talks about setting expiration dates for personal, social networking-type information, but it could apply in other areas as well.

I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around it, but I’m still not sure how I feel about it. For organizing personal digital documents this might be great. But if this could be done with any bit of digital information that is put online, how would that work? Would this be helpful or harmful in when thinking about digital curation? After all, the point of archiving something is to keep a lasting record of it. How much harder would it be to curate information with expiration dates?

Yes, on one hand it would be nice to have digital data available for a set period of time (and it would give those a little too fond of life caching a clean slate after awhile… which would be good for getting those embarrassing undergrad party photos that just about everyone has posted at one time or another off the internet). At the same time, what type of data expiration standards would need to be developed; what types of digital information would need longer or shorter expiration times? How would this work?? Obviously, this article has raised some questions... Anyway, it was an interesting idea that I wanted to share.