New York Times Magazine: Does the Web Ever Forget?

The New York Times Magazine has an excellent article discussing the consequences of a Web that never forgets. What happens when the innocent emails and Facebook posts you send today suddenly resurface 10 or 20 years later? Is there any way for users to proactively control the lifetimes of data stored on third-party Web services, like GMail, Facebook, and Flicker? Last year UW security and privacy researchers Roxana Geambasu and Amit Levy, along with faculty members Yoshi Kohno and Hank Levy, published an award-winning paper at 2009 USENIX Security describing a new approach for empowering users with such control. Their new direction direction, called Vanish, is featured in this article.