In the big data age, we should be entitled to "forgotten rights."

More than 30 years ago, the famous futurist, Toffler (Alvin Toffler), published a landmark magnum opus "The Third Wave" (the third Wave). This book divides human society into three stages: the first wave was the agricultural phase, which began about 10,000 years ago; the second stage is the industrial stage, beginning at the end of 17th century; The third stage is the information (or service) stage, starting from the late the 1950s, and the big data is called "The third wave of the CLS movement". However, the "big data" has really become a buzzword in the Internet Information technology industry, starting in the 2009. That is, from the concept of attention to the beginning of the "Big Data Mining" and "personal privacy protection" contradictions of the topic.

The previous two years, Victor Maire Schoenberg (Viktor Mayer-schönberger) 's "Big Data Age" sold very hot, some of the chapters also involve the issue of personal privacy protection. However, many people may not have noticed that Victor has published almost simultaneously a sister article, "delete": At present, more than 90% of the information for the digital form, so that the entire human lost the forgotten nature, the world is set into memory mode, the Internet remembers everything about you, that is to say: memory has become the norm, and forgetting has become an exception, The likelihood of personal privacy being violated is also getting bigger. This digital memory poses two major threats: information control and the temporal spectre of permanent past creation. In this era, anything once put on the network, there will always be traces can not be completely deleted. In the Chinese version of the deletion, the subtitle "The Virtue of forgetting in the Digital age" is translated into "the trade-off of large data", which is not an expression of the author's original meaning, rather than a "virtue forgotten in the digital era". In fact, after reading this book will find that the author of the information privacy is pessimistic, so not to talk about trade-offs, but emphasis on deletion and forgetting. From the author's last three chapters to remind people how to restore the forgotten function of seen, such as: to a "internet forgetting" movement, to give information a storage period, so that the forgotten back to normal.

We can sit in the office, Pat the head, casually think of a smart and strategic vision to see: the protection of privacy can not be unworthy. But that doesn't solve any problem, because people subconsciously worry that if individuals can't really get the right to control information privacy, once the information is shared, it means we lose control of the information.

Published last week in the Journal of Science, "large data, big question" (Big Questions) for the title of a news commentary. The article is mainly aimed at the problem of large data paradox encountered by researchers, so the article begins with the following: Can researchers use "big data" without sacrificing personal privacy? Some of the patterns hidden under large datasets, such as data collected through smartphone apps, online retail sites, or clinical trials, Can produce important insights into scientific issues, but sharing these data makes it easy to violate privacy and lead to discrimination in areas such as housing, health care and employment. A report, chaired by White House adviser John Podesta, calls for a number of measures to strengthen privacy protections for consumers, students, patients and others. Supplementary reports on large data technology dimensions, mainly by the President's Scientific and Technical Advisory Council (PCAST), concluded that technical measures were not enough to protect privacy, and suggested that policies should focus more on how to use large data rather than how to collect and analyze it. To raise these questions is not a complaint about one's own technology or methods, but our goal is to maximize the benefits of large data while minimizing privacy and other risks.

In the past 4 years, U.S. research and development spending has continued to fall by a total of 24 billion dollars. But in 2012 the White House began a 200 million dollar "Big data development plan" spanning six federal departments and agencies. Last November, the White House launched a "from data to knowledge to action", which will focus on medical research, geographic information, economics and linguistics, respectively (knowledge) (http://news.rfidworld.com.cn/ 2013_11/1766891ff5ce0150.html). The 2015 budget for the U.S. President will also fund several related projects, including the National Institutes of Health's "Big Data Transfer" program (BD2K) and the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Scientific Computing Research project. The BD2K project will develop a wide range of standards, tools, software and other methods to leverage the vast amounts of data generated by health and medical research. Many of these problems are the game between large data mining and personal privacy protection.

"We live in a wonderful new world, data is a commodity, access to data is an expectation," Ariella Kelman, medical director at the Genentech Group, said at a forum meeting on scientific reproducibility. Drug companies, which accumulate huge datasets in clinical trials, have historically been restricted to corporate researchers, collaborators and regulators like the FDA, but are now considering ways to share data. Last year, two trade associations, such as the American Drug Research and manufacturers and the European pharmaceutical Industry and Association, issued common guidelines aimed at promoting wider sharing of data with patients, researchers and the public.

The health sector, which has been pushing for the use of large data for scientific research, has been the most controversial. Personal DNA information, personal or public information or research material? Although the police use DNA information in the search for murderers in the case of a number of exploits, but the police collection and use of DNA data may harm the freedom and privacy of innocent people. April 14 this year, in order to find a sexual assault on a 16-year-old girl's criminal, the French prosecutors decided to the whole school 527 male students and staff of DNA testing, if the refusal to accept the test will be considered a possible suspect. The move raises concerns about human rights abuses, which the US Times says are not allowed in the United States (http://news.163.com/14/0415/09/9PS608UF00014JB6.html).

Google has been proud to remember many things in obscurity, but a recent incident has disappointed Google's search engine and web publishers: A Spaniard who found in Google's search that his house had been repossessed by the bank, said the search results violated his privacy, Asked Google to delete the relevant search results. The European court ruled in early May that the Spanish won, which means the EU residents in the future on the Internet privacy, the relevant legal precedent. As a result, Google May 30 released an online form, so that people submit applications to delete all personal users on the Internet search information, just one day to receive more than 12,000 European residents request to return them "forgotten rights" (from the network to delete their own relevant electronic information rights), This right is, of course, open only to European residents. (http://tech.163.com/14/0601/15/9TLREIFP00094ODU.html)