Over lunch we were discussing how embarrassing it must be for people to document their college years in such detail in on Youtube, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, etc. What looks fun today likely won’t be tomorrow — especially when looking for work.
So we wondered… Wouldn’t it be cool if you could attach expiration dates to images, blog entries, or anything you put on the web? You could say “in 18 months this picture should be deleted” or “3 years from now delete this blog post.”
I know the Wayback Machine keeps archives of just about everything online, but what if expiration dates were a universal truth? So Wayback, or anything else that records the net, would also obey the expiration date rules. It’s your content—why do we assume it has to live forever?
Anyway, just an idea. We liked it at lunch so I figured we’d put it out there on the blog.
Dave Stern
on 24 Jan 08I like it, sort of a Mission Impossiblog thing.
I think in our current environment where companies are so greedy for data, it would never get universalized, but it’s a good feature idea for a platform.
John
on 24 Jan 08One would think that any image which would warrant an expiration date would be one that a person should be naturally hesitant about posting online in the first place.
That being said, if forethought went into this sort of thing at all, it probably wouldn’t be as much of an issue in the future.
A question becomes: does this qualify only for media posted to the web, or does one extend the principle further? Given the obvious difficulty inherent in coming to any agreement or standards in the technology sector, while it seems like a decent idea for future job-seekers/squares, it is solving the wrong problem.
Good idea in theory, but impractical in a web-wide sense.
Chris M.
on 24 Jan 08My wife works for the MN Historical Society. And ideas like that terrify her. :)
A lot of history comes from things that people never thought would be historical. Diaries, photos, newspaper clippings, etc.
So those pictures might have started out as “Fun”, now are “Embarrassing” but one day they might be “History”. Do you really want to ‘expire’ your history?
Just something to ponder.
Chris M.
Justin K
on 24 Jan 08Really, isn’t this simply DRM in the hands of individuals, applied to a diversity of content?
Levi McCallum
on 24 Jan 08I don’t think deleting content would be the wises thing to do. Maybe privatizing it would be wiser.
Jeff Croft
on 24 Jan 08First, I love the expiration date idea. Awesome.
But, really, I question how much this will really be an issue in the future. Right now, there’s a generation gap - it won’t last that much longer. My daughter is 12. Let’s assume, over the net several years, she does what nearly everyone is going to be doing: she posts tons of photos and videos of herself, some slightly provocative, some drunk, some silly, etc. Then, when she’s 25, she goes to get a job. Even if the potential employer find archives of all these photos and videos and such - aren’t they probably ALSO going to find similar videos of every other applicant?
I guess I just think this kind of thing is an inherent truth with the younger generation—everyone is doing it, and if everyone is doing it, can you really hold it against any individual?
It’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out in ten or 15 years.
JF Picard
on 24 Jan 08The problem is that if someone put something on the web, he thinks it’s great and that it’s still gonna be great in 10 years. Of course he’s wrong. But he doesn’t know that for now. At least I was like that. Thank god, facebook didn’t exists 10 years ago!
Andy
on 24 Jan 08This is one aspect of the idea behind DRM. Since DRM is a feel-good measure rather than something that actually offers control and is never workable in practice, this is entirely unimplementable. I mean, it’s kind of a wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if thing, but actually coming up with a way to implement it is a losing battle—one’s time is best spent elsewhere.
There are numerous failed businesses that tried to put limitations on email just like this. Viewable only for a certain time, or not printable. They were all snake-oil.
Matt Brown
on 24 Jan 08Smaller scale, but similar… I went to post a sticky post in my new forum system today and it gave me the option to set an expiration date of when it would automatically fall back into the normal queue of posts; 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, etc. I thought that was a very cool feature. It lets me set it and forget about it.
There’s so much stuff out there that we forget about. It would be nice to have the ability to set an expiration date at the time of creation, when you are conciously aware that you will probably forget about it and not want it “out there” some day.
Jamie Tibbetts
on 24 Jan 08Could the concept be retroactive so that I could get rid of all the pictures of me from the 80’s with my sexy, sexy mullet?
Speaking of mullets, I wonder what the equivalent of the mullet will be in 20 years when we look back at our Flickr pics from the 2000’s.
Matt Brown
on 24 Jan 08@ Jamie
Right here.
samgrover
on 24 Jan 08It’s an interesting idea, but it reminded me of the evil bit. If you put up a restriction, those with other intentions will simply ignore it.
@Chris That’s a great point.
@Levi: Ha ha!
Randy
on 24 Jan 08Anything posted online can be copied and stored. The myspace photos on torrent right now for example, those photos were supposed to private, now they will be on hundreds of computers and shared. Setting an expiration date would be as useless as those scripts to keep people from stealing images.
Would Geocities and Tripod be considered the Facebook and Myspace of 10 years ago?
Colin
on 24 Jan 08I just choose to work in jobs and with people who don’t care about my debaucheries in the past.
Jason, do you really care if there is a picture of DHH doing a keg stand floating around the net? Or any of the other people you work with.
I feel sorry for the people I went to school with who are now corporate types. For me, It’s not something I worry about.
Marcus Breese
on 24 Jan 08Excellent point… maybe the expiration should be “This picture should not be viewable after 18 months, but should be viewable 1 year after I die (or until my kids won’t be embarrassed)”... Don’t presidents do this with some of their archives?
Not sure how you’d implement it though…
James
on 24 Jan 08The idea has been played with at least in some form. For example William Gibson’s self destructing poem on a diskette.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_%28A_Book_of_the_Dead%29
Peter Cooper
on 24 Jan 08It’s an idea that quite a lot of people have raised and I still think it’s horrible (although I might read back in 40 years and laugh at my very own comment here!). If people have a problem with things they did or said in the past or are unable to see what life’s really about, that’s very sad.
We are all complex people with various ghosts in our closets, and opening that up via the Internet is a great thing, not a thing to be restricted. We’ve all said and done quite a few crazy things online, but why should anyone be embarrassed for his / her existence?
Steve Drees
on 24 Jan 08@Jaime
“Speaking of mullets, I wonder what the equivalent of the mullet will be in 20 years when we look back at our Flickr pics from the 2000’s.”
The FauxHawk.
Klaus
on 24 Jan 08The company I work for would LOVE this. We provide a website that aggregates suppliers Hi Res Images to creative agencies etc for advertising. The biggest complaint is that the creatives hold onto files and use out of date imagery rather than getting the latest images. Really frustrating for FMCG companies as packaging is constantly changing.
It will never work…Build a DRM and people will find a way to circumvent it. If the original is used as part of a new composite piece of work then the DRM is obviously lost. Best we can hope for is to make tools that are so dead simple to use, and provide too many benefits to these people that they never hold onto the image and keep coming back to us for the new ones.
LessMor
on 24 Jan 08@ Jamie
Tats
Jorge Chollet
on 24 Jan 08@ Colin: That’s exactly what I started to think as I was reading the comments.
Most – if not all – of us have embarrassing photos and many of us have shared them over the web; so if I’m ever in a position to interview someone and I see some of their online photos I wouldn’t hold anything against them. We all have a private life and a professional life. As long as they get the job done I wouldn’t really care what they do in their free time.
Unfortunately not everyone thinks this way so I understand the concern. If our bosses or potential employers judge us for what we do in our private life instead or our professional life then maybe we’re better off working for someone else.
Alan
on 24 Jan 08Employers should make decisions based on who the applicant is, not who they used to be. That said, I’m sure the lines between personal and professional social life will continue to blur, even if we give our shared content a lifespan. As I’m getting closer to finishing college and starting a career, It’s nice to think I may not have to try to manage multiple identities.. (not that I would really need to!) but the expiration date idea would seem to support that separation.
JF
on 24 Jan 08Jason, do you really care if there is a picture of DHH doing a keg stand floating around the net? Or any of the other people you work with.
No, I don’t care at all.
But I’ve heard some of my friends mention it before so it is an issue for some of them and some of their employers.
Anyway, it was just an idea I wanted to put out there. We don’t have to take it too seriously.
Pete Forde
on 24 Jan 08I’m sure a whole bunch of Suicide Girls are going to be all over this idea in 10-15 years.
Emily
on 24 Jan 08This really should be a law. What a great idea. People should be able to control their own archives online.
The idea that everything you do on the internet that’s indexable is probably being saved for ever and ever (with no way to erase) (by Google or Wayback or whomever) is just plain scary.
I do agree that EVERYBODY – but college (and high school) kids especially – needs to be very careful what they do online cause it could come back to haunt them. Like it or not.
That one NJ mom in the Frontline show wasn’t so far off. She shouldn’t have asked for her kids’ passwords, but being concerned was understandable.
Vicky
on 24 Jan 08I kind of consider it a right of passage, although I don’t wish negative consequences on anyone, that’s just the way it is. I do however feel bad for the ‘ones’ whose privacy is violated and not something they brought upon themselves, so to speak.
We’ve all done stupid things in our youth that no other generation has had to deal with before our generation, tape recorders taped our voices and cameras captured our ‘bed head’ or ‘naked baby in the bathtub’ moments.
It’s just youth and the I’m Superman mindset, that life will eventually beat out of them. :)
Warren Henning
on 24 Jan 08You aren’t the only ones to have this idea. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor in Harvard’s JFK School of Government has talked and written about this at some length.
See http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/05/teaching_comput_1.html .
Killian
on 24 Jan 08If it goes on the magical web it stays on the magical web….
The best way around this fact is to create an evil (bizarro) twin persona that only lives on the evil web and a good twin that only lives on the good web and your resume!
On a side note: I noticed a site I was mocking up was getting crawled even though there are no links to this page. I assume gmail is the culprit since I am using gmail for most mail these days.
Has anyone else noticed that if you include a dark URL in a gmail message that google will actually add that link to its spiders?
Erik Mallinson
on 25 Jan 08I don’t think it’s a good idea, I’ll echo what other said and that one day that’s history.
I think that the people who are interviewing you should focus on your work instead of blowing time on YouTube. What the hell kind of job pays people to spy on peoples MySpace, Facebook and YouTube activity?
Calvin Lough
on 25 Jan 08Don’t forget that trying to take something off the internet can be like trying to take pee out of a pool. Remember the HD DVD key?
Vicky
on 25 Jan 08I don’t really think anyone even has to go through all the ‘work’ of spying on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, ect…
If your name is associated to a page… and your name doesn’t change… or your email address with your name… Then Google or another search engine will spy for society and catalog it.
Why would it be so hard to believe that a corporation that spends big bucks on an HR department, interviews a person multiple times (with multiple people interviewing), wouldn’t spend 15 minutes on the internet. That’s probably the biggest bang for their buck that their going to get! If I was going to invest in two weeks of training for a new hire, hire them for a union job, or potentially get sued in the future. Why wouldn’t I want to Google them. Sorry folks but you can do a full background check for $50.00 with 5 minutes of time wasted. Wouldn’t you check out someone if it was your business or if you were renting a room in your house. There are perverts and crazies out there. I at least Google if not more, to check out applicants/ tenants for an upper apartment. I look on the internet to find any sex offenders within 2 miles of my house and that live on the street that my kid walks to school. It’s not all about ‘spying’.
If you gossip regularly about people (you know who you are), you probably spread less truthful information then information someone posts about themselves and if you’re old enough to play… Any moment ‘caught in time’ and not directly controlled by you is open season.
Rabbit
on 25 Jan 08I don’t like the idea at all. Two reasons:
1. We have enough problems with people in authoritarian positions destroying evidence. We don’t need another axis point for people, in any position, to be able to destroy content.
2. Lighten up. You are who you are: the sum of everything you’ve ever done up to this point. Accept it.
Alok Jain
on 25 Jan 08Jason,
I think the point is quite valid, now people do have capability to delete stuff through their account management, I think instead of setting an arbitrary date for deletion a more universal account management software which keeps track of multiple accounts we have all across might be more effective.
- AJ
Jose Espinal
on 25 Jan 08hahahaha….funny post… I have thought of that before, I like to write my thoughts a lot on paper when I’m not doing anything, one day I looked at one of my high school notebooks…and…that was corny…but it’s a funny thing to laugh at that and then throw it away!
MAnuel Martensen
on 25 Jan 08Yeah, let’s erase yesterday.
Sorry, but that is just pathetic, but i’ll explain myself:
Ok, i have not had many embarrassing moments i shared with the internet, but just as an example: i just posted an article about “Scientology”. For sure, that’s a topic not every headhunter or boss will appreciate when looking thru my resume. And i could add the “terminate me in 300 days”-tag to it, that is your idea. But why should i?
Sure, i could change my mind on things and with some things this will probably happen. But this is me, this is me today. And today (which is tomorrows yesterday) is a part of me. And i don’t want to erase that part of my map.
As i said, maybe not every boss will appreciate that part of me, my yesterday, but i want to be employeed by someone who likes me (because i will spend an awful lot of time with those people), and not just my skills. This might sound weird to the business monkeys out there, but that is the true problem.
You are hiring people, not just their skills. You hire their history as well. You hire them not because of that history, but it is part of the deal, eventhough it is just the skills that you pay for.
Example: My current boss knows how i tick. And luckily he is ok with it now. If i find something that sucks, i am the only one in the company who will tell him that “this sucks”. He is still offended because of my tongue, but after he calmed down, he appreciates my honesty and the input. And if he finds out about my “Scientology vs. Christianity” article, he knows that this is just me.
And i want to stay like that, stay like me. And that goes for my next boss as well. If he wants my skills, he has to be ok with the whole package. I wont act like someone else “just to get a job”, my character is to expensive to me, no job can pay for another.
If you smoked dope in high school and that is on the internet, it just shows one part of you. Who didn’t. A boss who won’t understand such basic rules of human life can kiss my ass and is noone i want to be empoyeed to.
Long reply i guess :)
Manuel Martensen
on 25 Jan 08That said, i should add that my current job pays not very good.
Now you probably laugh about me and think “You have a bad payed job because you could not pull yourself together. You should have erased all marks of your yesterdays character and history and should have adapted to the companies character-profile.”
Maybe i shoud have, but then i would be just another dull face on the floors passing by.
I could not take the other job that payed better, where i had less work to do, because that boss just wanted my skills, not my history.
But now i got a job where i can stay as i am. While doing it, i keep on looking for a better one. And it will come. And if not, then i still got “me”. ;)
ODS
on 25 Jan 08It’d be a lot funner to be able to make the access to the resources be controlled by the person who creates the content. In other words, make it so I can keep control of when a picture/video/whatever is unavailable. So, when I break up with my girlfriend, it takes me one or two clicks to destroy every reference to our relationship online!
Arete
on 25 Jan 08Rabbit raises a good point: if you had the ability to add a “self destruct timer” on all the content you create, it would open up huge possibilities for criminals and the likes – you could share information in the open, public space without any fear of it leaving a trace.
Also for practices of science I’d see this as a bad thing. Already a lot of scientific content is published online only. And what is once published, should stay in the public domain. Science is based on accumulated knowledge in which the previous knowledge/data is always exactly referred to – if the authors were able to remove the previous contents away from there on a whim, the whole construct could be shaken.
Same applies to any knowledge shared on the public domain. Journalism, decision making in democracies etc.
Also, I’d fear this would benefit (most powerful) corporations more than private people. As already mentioned here, it would certainly be taken to use gladly by anyone who was selling digital content for money – and as we can see happening with immaterial property rights, it is the big corporate actors who usually draw the longer straw while the smaller, independent actors benefit little or may even suffer.
Terry
on 25 Jan 08You guys go to lunch together everyday?
Tom G
on 25 Jan 08Data lifecycle is inevitable.
Burgeoning data is a huge problem for corporations and almost everyone these days. If hard drive technology hadn’t grown so much our hand would have been forced already.
Eventually we will be holding on to so much data that we’ll have trouble finding what we want.
We try to build into our projects a plan for archiving stale data, but this doesn’t always happen or work as we intended.
As for the jpg expiration… It’s interesting but I envision lawmakers mandating privacy law and hackers distributing viewers that ignore the expiration attributes.
I’m glad we live in a day where a presidential candidate can be truthful about youthful indiscretions (let’s see how tolerant we really are). I think some common sense on the side of the people posting things in public places combined with tolerance is the only workable solution.
The whole picture on facebook thing could be a legal mess. What about people who did not sign a release for their picture to be shown in public through a media outlet. This is a legal battle waiting to happen.
Would 37Signals disqualify a job candidate that posted party pictures on facebook in the past? I doubt it. If so, send them my way.
Patricia
on 25 Jan 08Yeah, good idea.
Thankfully I didn’t get onto the internet until my last year of college and by then I started interviewing so any records of my, ehem, “adventures” are purely passed on via oral history – and we all know how that can be distorted. ;-)
Ah, but we can argue an old blog or pic was hacked. So there is still some redemption to be had.
Wolf
on 25 Jan 08If the employers care all that much, they’re probably not great people to work with. I would at the very least try to hire people based on who they are, not who they’ve been.
In the ideal world I would let every potential employee work with my team for a month. I don’t really believe in hours of talking and application forms.
Matt Russell
on 25 Jan 08On the forum I run, I just had a member message me the other day to remove a comment he made a few years ago (involving the word “ganja”) because he was currently applying to grad schools.
Definitely a concept worth exploring, though I doubt he would’ve had the forethought to set an expiration date back then.
I’ve often times considered letting threads “expire” on the forum (especially given how long it takes to backup the cursed database), but how to differentiate between the “cruft” and the historically- or technically-valuable posts seems to require human intervention.
Tom G
on 25 Jan 08Wolf – unfortunately trial periods are very difficult in reality. Letting somebody go even after a month trial period still feels like firing somebody. Firing people is probaly the most unpleasant experience in my life. Firings destroy morale and bringing new people in is extremely expensive in many ways.
Carefully screening people using every conceivable method is the right thing to do for an employer.
That being said, party pictures on a social network might actually be counted on the plus side in my mind ;-)
Josh A.
on 25 Jan 08Interesting idea. Best way to do it would probably be to use the robots.txt file – that would stop the Wayback machine.
SU
on 25 Jan 08Dick Cheney called… He loves the idea!
Drew
on 25 Jan 08Well, let’s look for the really elegant solution here…
don’t post stupid junk on the internet. Pay the price if you do.
Well, that about solves it. ;)
Really, it’s like asking how we can keep brash young folks (or anyone else) from doing any of the stupid things they do that carry long-term consequences. Lots of things have long-term consequences, and learning that is an important part of becoming a reasonably non-self-destructive adult, if it doesn’t kill you.
Two cultural self-corrections seem most likely to me: young folks will get more sophisticated about limiting how much of themselves they make public and/or those who have done this stuff will gradually become the powerbase doing the hiring and they won’t think it’s a big deal anymore.
Vicky
on 25 Jan 08I understand the rationality behind ‘expiring’ content but I think where there’s a will there’s a way. How can we ever know something is truely gone. I believe this would be a false security even if it was implemented.
If something is posted, I can take a printscreen of that content and save it forever. I can save that webpage forever if just on my harddrive. I can save a graphic (sometimes) by doing a Save As or take a printscreen of the graphic so even if we would want to ‘delete’ something or have it expire we can’t be sure what has been done with the data during the time it was on the internet.
Am I missing something?
Jeff Croft
on 25 Jan 08Vicky-
You’re not really missing anything. This would never achieve 100% centertainy that you images or words wouldn’t be seen after the expiration date. But isn’t a 90% (or 80%, or 60%) chance they wouldn’t been seen better than no chance at all?
Peter Cooper
on 25 Jan 08A side point to raise here is that NOT everything that goes on the Web remains archived forever. There are blog points from merely six months ago that I can’t find because someone’s site got wiped and it never got picked up by Wayback. There are lots of things I’ve put online, including whole computer programs, that I’m unable to download now (the links are still there, but the destinations and mirrors no longer work). The chance of most, let alone “all”, of your digital output being archived into the future is slim to none.
Chris Kelly
on 25 Jan 08this is very interesting timing. I’m actively trying to decide if I want to take my entire blog history (which is in a backup file at the moment) and put it into the blog I was planning on starting up again (the entire thing has been offline for a few years). It’s mostly stuff from when I was in college; I like the idea of having it all out there, but at the same time, i wonder if there’s really any value to that content, other than at a personal level.
To me, it may be good to just start fresh, and essentially create a new identity.
Ten out of two people
on 26 Jan 08This idea (i.e. published information that self-destructs) doesn’t make any sense at all. Once something gets published, it is public domain. The cat is out of the bag. There’s no going back.
What people fail to comprehend is the fact that the web is exactly the same as everyday life affairs are. Your reputation on the web follows you, same as your reputation in everyday life follows you. You cannot obliterate the words and the deeds you’ve performed in the past. The consequences remain. And the same principle applies on the web.
I have already built a number of web sites that siphon and scrape all kinds of information from all kinds of web sites out there. And that information is then republished on the web sites that the businesses I’ve built the sites for are running. And I’m quite certain that other businesses and other web sites are then siphoning and slurping up my RSS and Atom feeds, thus propagating the info even further. The mashups such as the ones I’m constantly building are going to gain even more momentum in the future. The entire value proposition of the web rests (no pun intended:) on this fact that we have the ability to repurpose the content that may have been originally published for completely different reasons.
Given the fact that the information you’ve published at one point to some web site could’ve been siphoned and remixed and repurposed by countless other sites, how do you ever envision ‘expiring’ that information?
One thing is for certain—same as in everyday life, there is no way to delete or modify past events on the web.
Neil Wilson
on 27 Jan 08Nice idea, but it’s a bit like saying that it’d be nice if EFC822 email had a mechanism for authenticating users and handling spam.
Too late – it’s already built. Like it or not you can’t censor the Internet.
Isn’t it better to change attitudes to understand that larking around at college is part of growing up a rounded person.
Why do we have to pretend that we are always sensible all of the time and try and convince people we all were captains of the football team?
NeilW
Shawn Oster
on 27 Jan 08Trolling through a MySpace or Facebook profile to glean details on if you want to hire someone or not is illegal and you can get your ass sued into next Tuesday over it.
Aside from that any employer that bases their decision to hire someone or not over someone’s collegiate predilections is not the type of workplace you want to be in as obviously they don’t respect the division between a person’s work and personal life. If someone is a great graphic designer or HTML slinger or code monkey I could care less if they appeared on Girls Gone Wild or posted video of themselves in a Tijuana Donkey Show.
We have all done stupid things and to base a hiring decision around MySpace indiscretions is highly hypocritical, illegal and disrespectful. Plus most people are more concerned with going the startup route anyway these days so it’s pretty much only old guys that worry about these types of things :) Anyway, how embarrassing is it really if everyone else in the hiring pool also has some stupid Facebook/MySpace picture, video or blog? It really is the older generation that seems to care as much about these things.
Chris Cobb
on 28 Jan 08Why not take responsibility for the choices you make? If you document yourself being an ass in public, then you should expect people to find out about it.
Vicky
on 28 Jan 08Come out of the woods Bambi!
Your judged on everything. If a job is for telephone customer service, it’s your voice. If you’re in sales its the way you look and how you speak. If it’s to program where your never seen in public it’s your technical skills. If it’s for a CFO it’s how much money you’ve made for companies in the past.
I’m not a hater, just don’t shoot the messenger. I would also like to say that I feel if you have a 10 year job history, most employers will go with that, but if you’re fresh out into the workforce, you’re unproven.
About getting sued, unless you have a rich daddy, I doubt if any company is going to get sued by an employee making less than 60,000 per year (they’ll run you out of money so quick) and that’s not even touching whether it can be proven or not.
Pavel
on 28 Jan 08Not deleted, but hidden. “Delete” is too strong action – you never know future value of any photo, video, etc. But it would be helpful to be able to hide content according to expiration date, so you could always show it again.
This discussion is closed.