D: Minister of the Interior Announces "Digital Eraser"

Category: Nachrichten
By: M. Schröder - 2B Advice GmbH - the privacy benchmark

As the Rheinische Post reported on Sept. 7, 2010, Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maizière announced that he is endeavoring to integrate into the German Federal Data Protection Act (Bundesdatenschutzgesetz) a "Digital Eraser" for data that are stored in the Internet.

In an earlier interview with the FAZ of Sept. 5, 2010, the Minister of the Interior already stated that forgetting is an achievement of civilization with reconciling effect. As an example, he stated that deletion periods are even provided for criminal records. On the Internet, this is different. First and foremost, social rules must be developed there, the enforcement of which the state should make an instrument under civil law available to the parties concerned. However, the conditions under which a party concerned may demand  the deletion of data from another party on the Internet must still be determined.

 

The "Digital Eraser" brought into play by the Minister of the Interior in this connection could be an instrument to enforce the rights of parties concerned on the Internet. Legally anchored obligations of Internet services are conceivable for having available simple online options for disclosure and deletion. It would be likewise conceivable to issue data an expiration date so that they become unreadable after a certain period of time. An effective technical implementation of this variant could be based on cryptographic methods, but with this it must also be ensured that copies that the recipient made from the decoded data also expire. Thus, it might be really difficult to implement this, for instance with screenshots of photos that are stored in an Internet photo service, in order to save the expiration date also on the screenshot.

 

Companies that develop innovative solutions in this field could, depending upon the actual draft of a new German Data Protection Act, have a clear competitive advantage. In contrast to legal solutions, a technical solution would have the advantage of not being limited to a certain area, but would be helpful in enforcing the rights of the parties concerned on a world-wide basis.

 

One may look forward to the legal and technical development in this field with suspense.

 

Sources:

www.presseportal.de/pm/30621/1677202/rheinische_post

www.bmi.bund.de/cln_156/SharedDocs/Interviews/DE/2010/09/bm_faz.html

www.bmi.bund.de/cae/servlet/contentblob/1099988/publicationFile/88667/thesen_netzpolitik.pdf

 

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