Re: UK Government is suggesting a data deletion systems

On the face of it. "please delete everything you know about me" is simple enough.  But in the days of de-anonymization, it may not be.

It is reasonable, for example, for a store to remember that it sold a vacuum cleaner;  that it sold it to someone living in San Francisco;  that the purchaser was in teh 25-30 years old age bracket;  male;  living alone;  had recently bought a stove and ... and ...;  ... and so on.  These can all be used for product planning analysis, purchasing, stock-level, and other decisions, and so on.  All reasonable business practice.

At some point, someone will be able to work out who that is.  Then there's a problem.  And this (preventing re-correlation) is a moving and fluid target.  

This is one aspect;  there may be others.


On Nov 8, 2010, at 16:44 , Caspar Bowden wrote:

>> request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Rigo Wenning
> ...
>> The delete button is one of the ideas floating around in Brussels at the
>> moment. The technical savvy people know that this is a research topic.
> 
> Why? What is the engineering or comp.sci novelty?

David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Monday, 8 November 2010 15:59:48 UTC