Expiry Date for Digital Data
It used to be the case that information contained in newspaper reports about people would quickly disappear into archives which could only be accessed with difficulty.
Nowadays, because the internet never forgets and stores a considerable amount of data several times, it’s different. You never know, when data is deleted from a web site, if it has really disappeared from the internet. Saarbrücken information scientists have now developed a system which makes it possible for anyone to put an expiry date on their data and pictures.
„ Our system basically involves first coding information that is to be posted on the internet. The code needed to read the data is stored on several servers“, explains Michael Backes, Professor of Information Security and Cryptography at the University of the Saarland. In the future these servers could be made available to trustworthy organisations, so that every user would have the choice of where to store his keys. If someone then wants to call up the data on the web site, the appropriate computer first asks for the key. “This request and the actual encryption and decryption takes place in the background, fully automatically. The user doesn`t have to do anything“ said Backes.
For the user the system is easy to use: installing it is a one-off, uncomplicated matter. You only need an add-on for one of the commonly used internet browsers. „If you want, for example, to be sure that a party picture in the social network disappears after a few months, simply provide it with an expiry date when uploading it”, said Michael Backes. The server which the key for the data is stored on registers this date and deletes all the keys assigned after the period the pictures are to be viewable has elapsed. (Source: www.uni-saarland.de)
