Should Digital information have a use by date?
Oliver L. Haimson et. al the author of this week’s paper “Digital Footprints and Changing Networks During Online Identity Transitions” strikes the chord of Digital memory and the challenges that arise with having our digital identities persistent indefinitely. In order to outline this debate, the author chose Transgender people who investigates the challenges and concerns of managing one’s digital artefact (photos, names, and gender markers) in a networked environment after going through an identity transition (Change of gender).
In this work, the author conducted a qualitative survey and collected responses from 283 participants from the transgender community who are active on Facebook. The results have shown that in general, trans people who have had a Facebook account prior going through an identity transition face a lot of technical challenges when they try to erase their Digital footprints which can reveal an identity that is no longer representative to them anymore. However, the main concerns here are not the technical changes rather the impacts of being exposed. The results have also shown that trans people tend to obfuscate their digital footprints by: either editing the data that is considered a representative to the old identity (selective unfriending, having two accounts or even create a new account), or by configuring the managed networked environment through creating and modifying user lists and privacy policies that Facebook provide to us in order to control who can or cannot view our profiles.
The survey listed quite a decent number of responses or complaints about Facebook lacking the ability to un-tag multiple images at once or in other words “en masse un-tagging” as he describes it, whereas, others asked for the ability to have multiple profile names and being able to control who can see which. While the aforementioned responses seem to be technically challenging and complicated to be dealt with, yet some responses pointed out some minor changes that would make a difference to them such as improving the terminology used to represent family relations between profiles as in using “child” or “offspring” rather than “son” or “daughter”.
Despite the importance of the topic that the author raises, I find myself standing at a slightly different angle, because “the right to forget” is deeply conditional and questionable in so many ways. Moreover, I think that the survey responses sort of reflect a feeling of shame or as if those people are trying to hide something wrong they’ve done. Also, one can sense from multiple responses in the survey that the fear of coming out or resenting the old identity is directly related to the other people in the network, which has me wandering because Facebook is built on a core principle of “Friendship”, so why such people should be still in their friendship zone? What kind of friend will be non-supportive or rather bullying to his friend?
Finally, let’s not forget that Facebook, Google, Bing, etc.… are companies in the end and they exist because of the persistence property of our digital data, thus the author’s suggestion that perhaps we should start thinking about assigning an expiry date label to the digital information is unfair. Although that some particular sensitive cases deserve to be looked at independently, and that sometimes we need to forget in order to forgive, that doesn’t mean that we cannot forgive without having to forget. And it’s those tiny bits of happy, embracing, sad, emotional moments captured from the past what makes us who we are and perhaps we should embrace that fact and start by fixing people and challenging the social norms instead of looking for ways to live in the shadow or go low profile by trying to change the system itself.
This week I chose a paper that discusses the impacts of the photo tagging feature on Facebook and the sort of social tensions that it generates. I found it interesting how the author’s suggestion is to move beyond the untagging and into adding a layer of privacy to the tagged world.
Andrew Besmer and Heather Richter Lipford. 2010. Moving beyond untagging: photo privacy in a tagged world. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1563-1572. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753560
References:
http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets/factsheet_data_protection_en.pdf
Do we have the right to be forgotten? | Michael Douglas | TEDxSouthBank:
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