 Thank you very much. Thank you very much for this warm welcome. I am delighted to be here. Such lovely weather after the last couple of days. I was just delighted and I thank you quite deeply for making it today. I know that some of you might have to mop up at home perhaps. If you bear with me for the next 25 to 30 minutes, then I'm giving you a quick, broad overview of the argument that I put forward in my book. My publisher always asks me to put a plug in at the beginning. There is a book and it is still available now in paperback with an epilogue. What I'm going to do is not the standard academic presentation, if you bear with me, but rather a kind of meditation. A meditation on the topic of remembering and forgetting. Stacy Snyder wanted to be a teacher. By the spring of 2006 she had completed her coursework and was looking forward to receiving her teacher's certificate. Then from one day to the next her dream was over. She was summoned to the dean of her university and told that she would not receive her teacher's certificate. She would not be a teacher although she had the credits, past exams, completed practical training. She would not be given her certificate she was told because her behavior was not becoming of a teacher. Her behavior? A photo showing her with a cap and a cup. Captioned drunken pirate Stacy Snyder had put this photo on her MySpace webpage for her friends to see and perhaps to chuckle. But the university administration found the photo and found the photo to induce miners to consume alcohol and therefore to be inappropriate for a teacher. When Stacy was confronted by the university administration she considered taking the photo offline but it was too late. The photo had been indexed by search engines and archives by web crawlers. As much as Stacy wanted the photo to be forgotten the internet would not permit that. Remembering instead of forgetting, remembering, forgetting. In 2001 Andrew Feltmar, a Canadian psychotherapist in his 60s living in Vancouver wrote an academic article for a rather obscure journal. In the article he mentioned that he had taken LSD in the 1960s. In the summer of 2006, like so many times before, Andrew Feltmar wanted to cross into the United States to pick up a friend from Seattle International Airport. The immigration officer, the US immigration officer, googled Feltmar and discovered the academic article from 2001. Because Feltmar had failed to disclose to the immigration office, although he never denied it, that he had taken drugs 40 years earlier. He was interrogated for three hours, fingerprinted and then barred from entering the United States forever. Remembering instead of forgetting. Of course you may say now Stacy's and Andrew's cases are tragic but at least in part because of their own fault. Had they not put information online, Stacy would be a teacher today and Andrew could still travel into the United States. Everybody has to decide for herself, for himself, what to make available online. Or to quote paraphrase, but once has been put on the web is no longer forgotten. Really? Do we really know every time information about us is being collected, stored and made accessible? For most of us Google is the search engine of choice. Millions of people around the world send more than 3 billion search requests to Google every single day. Google is showing them the way. Google also shows us what is being searched where, when and by whom. Like this Google trans line for the search term Iraq over time you see how often it has been searched in which region, in which city, in which language. Google can analyze these search terms because Google remembers them. You might remember the H1N1 flu crisis last year and the year before. The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta and the United States mandates that all general practitioners, all the doctors send them information when they have a flu case coming into their office. In order to as in real time as possible map the spread of the epidemic or pandemic. The problem is that it takes the Center for Disease Control about two weeks to sort of collect and collate all the information and then to map it out. Google said we can do better than that by just looking at who is searching for flu information. Because the understanding was that there's a high probability that those people who search for flu information actually have the flu. And so when you look at this you can get actually almost perfect trends. The orange data is the actual CDC Center for Disease Control official government data of flu trends over time. And the blue one is the trend predicted by Google based on search terms. It's quite impressive. Google can do this even for events years back because Google does not forget. Since Google's humble beginnings more than ten years ago Google has stored every single search query it ever received. And every search result you ever clicked on. Remembering. Forgetting. For millennia for us humans forgetting has been easy. It's built into us. Biologically we forgot most of what we experience every day our feelings, our thoughts. Remembering is hard. Since the beginning of time therefore we humans have tried to overcome biological forgetting. Like this Navajo Indian to pass on our memories to our children. And the hope that they too may thus be able to remember. This is how the great epics of the world emerged thousands of years ago. But human memory is not fixed. It changes as we remember, as we reconstruct our past. So depending on it may not be sufficient especially when we want to capture something precisely or for a long period of time. Painting is one way of encapsulating visual impressions to create an external more precise and lasting memory. Like this beautiful cave drawing of the caves of Altamira. Script originally developed by accountants. Searching for a precise method of remembering as for millennia remains humanity's preferred external memory. Language, painting, script provided us with the capacity to remember through generations and across time. But these tools have not altered the fundamental fact that for us humans forgetting is easy and remembering is hard time consuming costly. The book did not change this either. Neither did the phonograph or film. Remembering remained expensive for most human beings and was thus chosen carefully. In other words forgetting was the default remembering the exception. This enabled us to deal with time. Through our capacity to forget we rid ourselves of excess memory, what has been long past fades in our mind. But because forgetting is built into us we humans never had to develop the cognitive ability to deliberately forget, to depreciate memories and to make them fade. If I tell you something and I say you must forget it now you will remember it. Today this is different. Google remembers, Yahoo remembers, Amazon remembers, the internet archive remembers, flight reservation systems remember, flight reservation systems remember? Yes, even if you never booked the flight just looked at it they remember it for six months just in case some law enforcement agency might want to take a look at it. And not always do we realize that we have contributed to digital memory and to made it accessible on the net. For example, millions of Facebook users around the world change their profile when they begin or end a relationship. This, not that you are in a relationship or not, but that your relationship status changes is excessive as part of open graph, Facebook's open graph, and can be captured by third parties. In the aggregate this may reveal amusing trends like this chart depicting when relationships end most frequently over the course of the year. But it can also be analyzed on an individual level. Indicating not just who you were in a relationship with, how long your relationships last over time, and how many each one of you had. Or take this example that I brought from my home turf. This is a map of London. Each dot that you see represents a photo that has been taken there and uploaded to Flickr with geolocation information attached to it. That photograph, that map will tell you where to take photographs in London. In the aggregate it reveals interesting trends. But broken down on the individual level we can begin creating profiles in time and space of where individuals have been over time just by looking at the Flickr stream of the photos that they upload. So from forgetting we have moved to comprehensive remembering. How did this happen? Well you know this as much as I do. Four elements. The first one is digitization. I don't have to say much about that. The second one are advances in storage technology. In 1965 a young engineer by the name of Gordon Moore surmised that the density of integrated circuits in the world might approximate a doubling every two years. Importantly digital storage capacity has tracked the impressive increase in processing power that Gordon Moore first witnessed more than four decades ago. Now Gordon, if you think that this is impressive, think again, look at the y-axis. This is a logarithmic y-axis. If you wear a linear y-axis that would go up like this, I couldn't even chart it well. Gordon Moore did well for himself. He founded a small ship company called Intel. But storage third is not alone sufficient. Secret police like the East German Stasi de Gestapo and so forth had hundreds of millions of facts in its files of almost millions of its citizens. Yet with their elaborate systems of pseudonyms and codes and mostly paper based files they had difficulties retrieving the information they had in time. This too is different today as full text indexing, prohibitively expensive. Only a few decades ago today is so affordable that it is not only what drives our expectation of the internet. Google, Bing, but was also built into most major file systems. Add to this the ability to access information through global infrastructure. A few minutes are sufficient to disseminate a document even accidentally and have it distributed around the globe. At this page from the manual of Operating Air Force One, the Presidential Aircraft, was made available online accidentally by the US Air Force for a very short period of time. Once the mistake was realized of course it was too late. And this by the way are the instructions how to get into Air Force One just in case you ever needed. So taken together today this has led to remembering becoming the default in forgetting the exception. To an extent this ought to be a reason for celebration. Yes, our vast digital memories offering numerous benefits, increased accuracy, improved efficiency all the way to the promise to help us transcend human mortality. At the same token undoing forgetting has I believe consequences far beyond the narrow confines of information efficiencies. Two terms characterize what I believe is truly at stake. Power and time. Power. Power is relative and relational. As data protection scholars have long argued, power over information may translate into power over the individual the information refers or pertains to. But such informational power reaches beyond the confines of information privacy. So consider this. For centuries the Catholic Church rested its power in no small part on its domination of the institutions of remembering. From scribes, from books to libraries. It took a combination of Gutenberg and Luther to change that. A societal consequence of power imbalances has often been for those that feel disempowered to choose silence. And this is precisely what power holders intend. It also has of course the potential to influence how we transact and how we interact. But there's more. Take Jeremy Bentham's idea of the panopticon. The panopticon is the concept of a prison in which the prison guards can watch the prisoners without the prisoners knowing when and whether they're actually being watched. The aim of the panopticon is behavioral compliance of the prisoners to the permanent threat of invisible surveillance. Oscar Gandhi and others have suggested that the internet creates a global panopticon in which everybody has to assume that he's being watched all the time. Such a panopticon, Gandhi argues, may lead people to self-censor fearing that their utterances could be misconstrued by any of the hundreds of millions of individuals online. But today we may face more than just a global panopticon. Because of comprehensive digital memory we have to assume that what we say or do today on the net will not only be witnessed now but will remain accessible for years, perhaps decades into the future. This creates a temporal panopticon in which we may be prompted to self-censor not because we are afraid of how others might interpret our words and deeds today but because how people and institutions in the future might view them. My second concern is time or more precisely how we humans deal with time. So consider the following hypothetical. I'm a lawyer by training so I come up with hypotheticals. Jane and John. Jane and John are old friends. Although they live in different cities now they try to catch up at least once a year. One day Jane receives an email from her friend John telling her that he's coming to town and he's looking forward to having coffee with her. Excited, Jane, because she hasn't seen John in almost a year, Jane wants to reply right away and suggest a nice place to meet. To remind her where they met last time John was in town she queries her email box folder. Up top dozens and dozens of email messages she had received from John over the years. She's quickly browsing through them to find the right one but then her eye catches a 10 year old email with a strange subject line. She starts to scan its text and then begins to read. Surprised, perhaps even shocked, she reads about how John deceived her and revisits angry exchanges back and forth between them. Slowly the events and feelings triggered by this concrete external stimulus come back to her mind for sense of betrayal and deception. She reads on about how over the following month John and her apparently must have reconciled but exactly how and when and why the emails do not tell. But at the forefront of her mind now is how John, her good friend John, deceived her. And suddenly she's not so sure anymore she wants to meet with John when he comes to town. As much as her analytic mind wants to disregard the revived memory, the angry words she read triggered her recall. They are the external memory that helped us remember things that we thought we forgot but they also make cloud our ability to evaluate and to decide. Put in more abstract terms, cognitive psychologists remind us that for us humans it is difficult to realize time as a dimension of change. This may trigger incorrect decision making. In the analog times the dangers were still there but they were limited. Our human forgetting obscured our cognitive difficulties with time. But what when we are not permitted to forget anymore? We know a little bit about the consequences through studies of less than a handful of human beings who have biological difficulties forgetting. This is AJ, a woman who has difficulties forgetting. Ask her about a particular day and she's able to tell you when she woke up who called what was running on television for every day the last 30 years. AJ cannot forget. But for her she says this is not a blessing it is a curse. She is haunted by the past so much in fact that it limits her ability to decide in the present. Whenever she has to decide she remembers all of her failed decisions in the past. Or as Argentinian writer Hergeles Borges said, comprehensive memory pushes humans to get lost in detail with no ability to generalize, to abstract and to evolve. They lose he writes what makes us truly human. We only see the trees never the forest. This is the fate we may face with comprehensive digital memory. Through perfect digital memory we also deny each other the capacity to change over time, to evolve and to grow. Turns out that without forgetting it is hard for us humans to forgive. And so with comprehensive digital remembering we may turn into an unforgiving society. But there is another wrinkle to the story. What if, what if frustrated with the shortcomings of our own human memory we begin to disregard our recollection of our own past and depend on digital memory instead. Does that give those that control digital memory, the Googles, the Facebook, the flickers, the YouTubes, the power to change history? You might think this is strange, but think again. In the Soviet Union there was an entire department of graphic artists whose task was to delete out of photos, retouch out of photos, people who had fallen from grace. And so you have a famous photo of Stalin and the Seven Comrades. And over the years all of the Seven Comrades vanish. And then it's just Stalin staying there at the table. Now that is the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is gone. But today there are commercial companies operating in the United States to which you can send your digital archive of photographs and they will edit your ex-husband or wife out of all of them. The group check in the Soviet Union disappeared for many years. He was in no photos at all. So these are some of the threats of shifting the default from forgetting to remembering. So normally as an academic I would stop here and tell you about the problem. What to do? Ah, responses. Some responses already exist. The first one of course is to enact data protection rights. The idea of data protection individual data protection rights is intriguingly simple. By giving each and every individual a right to informational privacy we empower the people to fight for their rights. Enforcement is both decentralized and delegated. It sounds great, but it comes with a number of inherent weaknesses. Most importantly the dose that we aim to empower the citizens do not care. In Europe strong information privacy rights have been enacted decades ago but by and large people have not used them. Information ecology is a second approach. That is the conscious regulatory restriction of what personal information can be stored and for how long. Such norms necessitate government action and compliance and enforcement may be costly but they have two advantages over individual data protection rights. They do not require individuals to go to court for enforcement and they protect against an uncertain future. Consider the case of the Dutch citizen register put in place in the 1930s for perfectly good reasons namely to ensure the administration of social security. The register included information about religion and ethnicity. Once the Nazis had invaded the Netherlands they targeted the register repurposing the information needed to identify Dutch Jews and to send them to concentration camps. As a result proportionally speaking more Dutch Jews were murdered by the Nazis than those from France, Poland or Germany. Even Jewish refugees in the Netherlands fared better because they were not included in the citizen register. It is a horrific lesson. As we cannot foresee the future and thus how personal information about us will be used it may be better to store less than more. This is the essence of information ecology norms. Unfortunately since 911 we have seen a significant backlash here together with a wave of information retention laws as part of a rhetoric of fear and security. Limiting the political chances for an expansion of information ecology to address digital remembering. So perhaps, dare I say, as a lawyer we need to think beyond laws. Some have argued for digital abstinence that is for staying away from the technical tools that enable digital remembering not sharing everything on Facebook President Obama reminded us that may certainly reduce the threat of digital remembering but is it realistic with over 720 million users worldwide and would we want to deprive us of the value of information sharing and peer production that these tools of the Web 2.0 provide us with? Another option, a sensibility exact opposite of digital abstinence is the idea of full contextualization or to store digitally as much information as possible. That might sound absurd but here's the argument. Perhaps the problem with digital memory is that it does not capture enough of an event including its context to let us relive it later on accurately enough. So if we could only store everything including the context we could avoid the negative side effects of digital memory. Jane could go back virtually in time. In essence, full contextualization would help us regain our ability to think in time. But would it ever be technically feasible? And even if it were, do we really have the time to relive all of our past again and again and again and again only to grasp what experiences in our past are no longer relevant for us today? A further alternative is to hope for a cognitive adjustment in our society. That is to hope that over time we'll learn to devalue older information and to live in a world of only present past. Now society has to change or its laws but our individual process of information evaluation and decision making. That sounds right and that would solve the problem. I like this approach but cognitive psychologists are extremely skeptical of our human ability to rewire a change in how we evaluate and process distant memories that we suddenly recall through an external stimulus. They suggest that it may take us humans a very long time to reconfigure our brains and change the way we evaluate information and what would be the appropriate mechanism to effectuate such change? A final and different idea is not to change humans but to change technology. Some, like Laurence Lastic, have proposed to use technology to change behavior. They said that we could create quasi-property rights to personal information, somewhat like copyright and build this into our technology, our PCs, our smartphones, our storage devices, etc. so that there is the technology in them to ensure that only those can process my personal information who I have permitted to do so. In short, the suggestion is to create a global digital rights management system to protect privacy. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Do we really need to create a global technology infrastructure that needs to watch every hour move to ensure that nobody abuses somebody else's information? Would we not thereby create a most comprehensive surveillance system in order to ensure privacy? I presented you with six possible approaches to deal with the challenges posed by digital remembering. Privacy rights and information ecology are based on legal norms to address the challenges. Digital abstinence and cognitive adjustment hope that this could be achieved on an individual level while privacy, general and full textualization mainly rest on achieving technical breakthroughs. The three on the left mainly target what I call the power aspect of digital remembering. The three on the right aim at addressing what I call the time challenge. None of them offer silver bullets although all of them help in their unique way. So hence we may need to mix and to combine them and perhaps even add something else. Something else, 95% done. Something else. In addition to a combination of the tools that we already have available I advocate for a revival of forgetting. That is to establish societal, technical, organizational, structural, institutional and regulatory mechanisms that ease forgetting in the digital age and that make remembering just a bit more strenuous. Not by much. I do not want to overly burden remembering but just enough to shift the incentives of forgetting and remembering back to what we humans are used to. There are many, many different ways to achieve this. One version of this could be called exploration dates for information. It would imply that whenever we want to store information we are prompted to enter not just a file name but also a date until which we want that information to be stored. Once they have been reached information is deleted from our system. We could choose the expiration date at will and change it at any point in time. I do not want to impose more of my solution on to you at this point in time. You have been patient enough to listen to me and the core message that I want to convey to you is the challenge we face in the shadow of digital remembering. But let me add one more example of how we could have digital forgetting. Remember putting photos or love letters or both in a shoebox in the attic or in the basement? You still have them and if you want to spend the time to go up into the attic or into the basement you still find them although some of them might have faded over the years. But retrieving them takes a little bit of effort thereby making, pragmatically speaking forgetting the default and remembering the exception. That little bit of extra effort is perfectly sufficient to help us stay focused on the present, forgetting, remembering. Since the beginning of time forgetting has been easy for us and remembering has been hard. In the digital age the relationship has become reversed. Today digital remembering is the default and it is forgetting that is often forgotten. I urge you I urge you to give back to forgetting the role it deserves. Let us remember to forget. Thank you.