A thought-provoking interview this morning with Professor Victor Mayer-Schönberger on Radio 4’s Start the Week with Andrew Marr examined how we deal with the mass of personal information that we publish online: should more be done to build obsolescence  into our personal data trail? This is an issue that I’ve written about before and to which all of us increasingly have to be alive, for once it’s out there in the public domain (the embarrassing Facebook photo, the comments from our friends etc.) there’s currently no going back.

The Professor’s suggestions for dealing with this include (if I understood correctly) creating something equivalent to tags that allow users to set a date after which their data will self-destruct; managing sub-compartments for our online lives; and something called ‘rusting’, which sounds suspect but makes quite a lot of sense.

It may be that one day, technology will allow us to append a use-by-date to our data, after which it will self destruct. But I suspect this will be a solution offered by individual data processors, at least to begin with. I can foresee a scenario where Twitter, for example, might offer users the option to have tweets self-destruct after a set time. The question is though: would that be that? Once the data has propagated itself around the net, can the original service provider ensure its effective destruction? I suspect not.

More realistic to my mind is the idea that we should take personal responsibility by taking more care as regards the people to whom we publish our data. This, with the support of service providers, shouldn’t be too difficult to achieve. At GazetMe we’ve always made our starting point that data recorded by our users should be private until such time as a user decides to make it public. What’s more, we allow our users to publish different information to different groups of contacts: you may want to present a detailed resume only to limited people, but a more general summary of your achievements to your wider network, for example.

And so then to ‘rusting’. This, the Professor explained, was like the way we store our personal papers in a succession of ever more inaccessible shoe-boxes: first the box is by our desk, then in a cupboard, then in the attic. At each stage it gets harder and harder to retrieve the information. In the online world, our data would simply acquire rust: retrieving it would become harder (slower) the longer it had been out there. Eventually, most of us would give up unless we really needed the data - that’s the point where we get out the step-ladder and head up into the loft.

Some interesting issues then, and doubtless technology will be part of the answer. The starting point though has to be that we take care of the information we put out there.