The Right to be Forgotten

On the Internet, nothing ever dies. Some groups feel that you should have the right to have your information erased completely -- to be "Forgotten". But it isn't all that easy, especially in a country like the U.S. where the over-abundance of lawyers and the legal system they have created through their next evolutionary step, the politicians, has resulted in the "land of perpetual employment for litigators".

This environment of continuous litigation results in businesses being expected to keep information for ever-longer periods of time. And the continuous stream of lawsuits mean that information needs to be retained for  extended periods of time.

Not just information, however, but the servers, workstations, and software systems required to retrieve the data. Data is useless if you can't retrieve it in some format that human beings can use to pry money from others through lawsuits.

I have worked at places where entire computer systems must be retained just in case data needs to be retrieved from systems which have long been replaced by more advanced systems on newer and more efficient equipment. This can be especially problematic when organizations change operating environments -- say from Sun to Linux or Linux to Microsoft. Even changes of things like databases can mean extra expense to be able to retrieve the information from the old database. And then there's the human element. Knowledge of the older system can vanish as experienced engineers leave the company or retire.

So what do you do? Well, you need to abide by the laws of the jurisdictions under which you operate. If you do any work on the Internet, this can be a daunting tangle of legal. As much as possible, you need to maintain or convert your data into formats which can be easily read by common tools. This can mean using standard encryption methods for storing sensitive data and avoiding proprietary coding for required data.

Documenting processes and methods for systems is important if you feel that a vital human resource will not be available when you have to retrieve the data. I can guarantee that if the knowledge is not recorded and saved that resource will be unavailable when you need to retrieve the information and you will spend vast amounts of time and energy working to duplicate the work which might have taken mere hours or days to record in the first place.

The bottom line is the data won't go away any time soon, and, at some point before it does, you may have to retrieve it in a meaningful manner for some lawyer. The best bet is to plan for this in your processes and document the techniques to accomplish it. Not pleasant, but, much better than the alternative when the subpoena is served and you have a deadline to do it anyway.