Constructive Destruction in Privacy

I’m a member of the SPUD Lab, newly-born lab founded by Sauvik, of School of Interactive Computing(IC) department at Georgia Tech. Recently, Sauvik and I reorganized our lab space to welcome prospective PhD students better. (Now it looks really neat! Please feel free to visit us :D) While we were cleaning our lab space, we found very interesting old electronic devices(junks…) that probably the lab that used this space prior to us left. In particular, we found that a bunch of floppy disks with some labels on them. For those who might not know what a floppy disk is, here is a kind description below.

Floppy disk: a type of disk storage composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic enclosure lined with fabric that removes dust particles. [1]

I also remember that I used this 1.44MB-storage disk to store the Pokemon game emulator when I was ‘younger’. Anyway, this is a disk storage.

This implies that the disks that we found from the junks probably store some sort of data. Of course, we did not want to check, and do not know, what the disks store. However, since these disks were kept in cabinets, I presume that it might have data that store confidential data or private information. Who knows?

This example shows that even if people might forget what they store in data storage devices, data storages never lose data unless they are physically damaged. This can be a weak link about privacy invasion. Then, how to prevent such possible cases?

Well…I almost wanted to say that everyone should be responsible for every data that they deal with. However, I understand that people (including me) are very forgetful. Then, I’d like to bring up this question. Is there a way to make a storage disk forgetful before human is being forgetful about their data? Is there any way to self-destroy data without human being caring out data storage devices? I believe that such a destruction sometimes can be beneficial for human, especially for privacy.

References

[1] Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Floppy Disk,” (accessed Mar 14, 2019),https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk