by MarkC
16. June 2010 16:55
A recent report by Dutch researcher Dr Harold van Heerde has suggested that data collected by websites should be made to degrade over time to help ensure privacy.
Of course, data degrades over time in any case as people's details change without them informing the sites that hold a copy of the data, so this proposal would simply help accelerate this process.
A regular data cleansing process would identify those details in a database that are no longer valid and allow them to be removed, further reducing the potential implications of a data loss.