Oblivion on the Web: An Inquiry of User Needs and Technologies

Abstract

Unlimited retention of personal information on the web may harm individuals: employers can find youthful indiscretions on social media, and incorrectly low credit scores may haunt individuals for a lifetime. Currently, Europe revives the "right to erasure" as a first step towards a forgetting web. Early technologies implementing oblivion suffer from vulnerabilities and narrowly assume that users require information to be erased after a pre-determined time. But little is known about users' actual oblivion needs. A first study shows that users desire control over disclosed personal information to reduce pre-disclosure privacy concerns, and to delete harmful information after disclosure. In the long run, users have a need for dissociating from obsolete information that represents their past identity. A second study analyses whether oblivion-enhancing technologies (OETs) currently deployed in online services satisfy users' needs. While not all services give users assurance that disclosed information can be erased again, most provide users with some active control. But to manage the increasing volume of personal information stored, users would also require "intelligent" support with oblivion. Intelligent agents that keep track of disclosed information long-term could automatically safeguard users from information relating to a past episode in life surfacing unexpectedly.

The changing public sphere on Twitter: Network structure, elites and topics of the #righttobeforgotten

“…In this context, the RTBF’s role is to enable users to control their personal history to achieve so-called social forgiveness (e.g. Korenhof et al, 2014; Mayer-Schönberger, 2009) and allow them to reinvent their digital persona (Novotny and Spiekermann, 2014).…”

Investigating Decay Representations for Privacy and Online Reputation Management

“…To diminish such negative consequences of online reputation, earlier research [76,87,113] in online privacy emphasized a need to design 138 for digital forgetting. The privacy and HCI literature [11,83,99,101,145,147,152] also suggest that existing privacy and forgetting tools do not adequately support users' online privacy and online reputation management needs.…”

“…As discussed in Section 2.2.1, users curate online self-representational data to meet current circumstances [5,51,52,58]. Consequently, usable privacy and HCI literature recognize a need for contextual privacy settings [5,9,83,99]. Previous work showed that Facebook privacy settings did not support users' sharing intentions [83], or their need for reflection [152].…”

“…Previous work showed that Facebook privacy settings did not support users' sharing intentions [83], or their need for reflection [152]. In addition, Novotny and Spiekermann [99] showed that users desire control over their disclosed personal information in OSNs and need to dissociate from obsolete information that represents their past identity.…”

“…They believe that it is the candidate's responsibility to manage their online reputation. Unfortunately, existing issues around ORM and privacy management make it difficult for users to address their intentions and needs [5,83,99,145,147,152].…”