Putting an expiration date on your digital past

By Caroline Biehl Sep 26, 2010, 18:21 GMT

Berlin - The internet never forgets: Whether it's an embarrassing party photo or an unfortunate comment on a blog - once it hits the web, it's hard to get it back.

Now, a professor from the Saarland region of Germany is proposing one way to defuse the problem: an automatic expiration date for digital content.

Take the case of Stefan. He iss confused. He's 26, athletic, good- looking and already has a degree in hand. He can even point to a semester spent abroad in Spain. Yet for some reason he's unable to land the job he's looking for. Again and again all he receives are rejection letters.

The answer might be more obvious than he realizes: a simple internet search for his name pulls up photos from that semester in Madrid that show a lot more partying than learning, as well as boorish comments on online networks.

While nothing is certain, there's a reasonably good chance that this virtual past is the root of Stefan's problems.

Applicants continue to underestimate the power of their online trail.

'If an HR officer can access vacation snaps or private homepages and sees that this guy always surrounds himself with a lot of women, they might start thinking, Is this guy a rascal? Is he going to be causing tension and heartbreak among the female trainees?' says Thomas Ruebel, CEO of a career consulting company in Germany. Anyone who's unable to be discreet with their private life might seem like a risk in the office as well.

Deleting the photos and comments frequently isn't enough. The internet never forgets. Search engines like Google or Bing comb through the internet automatically, registering everything that the user publishes.

Google top dog Eric Schmidt recently joked that people should receive the right to change their name when they hit adulthood so that they can escape their digital past. The fact that a lot of people took the joke seriously shows how sensitive the topic is right now.

IT specialist Michael Backes believes he's come up with a solution for the problem. 'You need to prevent data from being automatically stored,' says Backes, a professor of cryptography and computer security at the University of the Saarland.

'The idea is for users to define an expiration date when they create the information,' Backes explains. All that's needed is the one-time download of a plug-in onto the computer. A piece of software named 'X-pire' claims to produce data that becomes inaccessible after the expiration date.

'A key and the expiration date are stored on the server,' the computer scientist explains. The only way to get the key is to solve a Captcha, a graphic with a combination of numbers embedded in it.

Humans can pick out the digits, but computers cannot. Once the expiration data is expired, the key disappears forever and the data remains inaccessible forever.

The data countdown will be a relief not just for the applicants themselves, but for their concerned parents as well. It can be disconcerting to see your children spending the majority of their time on the internet and putting their personal lives out there for everyone to see.

Yet Walter Roehrig, a children's protective issues specialist for the State Media Institution of the Saarland, recommends 'intra-family contracts' instead of bans. 'Publish the images, but then they're gone again after six weeks,' says Backes in proposing a model contract.

The 'internet countdown' approach offers no guarantees against the misuse of data by others. Third parties can still 'copy, store and edit [photos] and put them back onto the net in another context without the original creator knowing anything about it,' warns Katja Knierim of jugenschutz.net.

Roehrig and Knierim strongly recommend keeping anything overly personal as far as possible away from internet communities. Even people who limit access to their internet friends need to 'remember that friends don't always have to stay friends,' Roehrig says. And no computer software can help with that.