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 ...