This policy project (in collaboration with Deborah Johnson) extends David Chaum's work on anonymity using the concept of social forgetfulness the idea that society selectively "forgets" in order to provide individuals with a "fresh start." Because arguments for protecting privacy inevitably lose when its individual value is pitted against collective social goods (e.g., security, efficiency), we structure our argument around the social, rather than the individual, value of forgetfulness and surveyed three areas bankruptcy, credit reports, and juvenile crime records where this social value has been explicitly recognized. Given systematic memorizing of data by network operators, we propose to prevent the erosion of the forgetfulness principle, using an approach integrating a variety of regulatory tools: market incentives, law, cryptography-based privacy-enhancing technologies.

Blanchette, J.-F. & Johnson, D. "Data retention and the panoptic society: The social benefits of forgetfulness", The Information Society 18(1):1-13 (January/February 2002). [PDF preprint]