Erasable Internet Now an Option

Most of the stuff on the Internet is permanently stored, in the servers of any one of the other major companies. The downside of course is that anything you said or any pic you posted (or in which you were tagged) can be used against you…forever.

Which is perhaps why Farhad Manjoo called the chat app, Snapchat, “the most important technology of 2013”, only half tongue-in-cheek. So what did he find so revolutionary about the app?
“Snapchat is one of the first mainstream services to show us that our photos and texts don't need to stick around forever.”
This is what Manjoo calls the “Erasable Internet”. This is almost heresy to the Silicon Valley orthodoxy that “data is inviolable” and that “you can never have too much data”.

The “delete” option is almost always an afterthought (if such a thought even occurs) in an era of dirt cheap memory. Costs aside, this is the age of Big Data: and so if a company doesn’t have data, well, what would it crunch? Web entrepreneur Anil Dash expressed the sentiment strongly:
“If you know where everybody is, where they're going, and what they're going to do when they get there, and you can't make money on that, you're a fucking idiot.”

And that’s the point. When done right, not only does the company make money, even we love the output of all this data crunching, as in Google’s translations, maps and oh yeah, search itself. Or in Amazon or Netflix’s recommendations. And let’s be honest, don’t many want a lot of those photos posted on Facebook to be preserved for nostalgia, accessible from anywhere?

As with everything else, there are benefits of the permanent and the ephemeral forms of the Internet. We just have to decide which form is suited based on the scenario…

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