What to do with the Nasties
BBC News is reporting that YouTube has removed some videos from its site that it judged to glorify the Columbine school shooters, which left me wondering what one does when one expunges “undesirable” data from a collection. Assuming the expunging is justified, do you keep the reference information so you have a record of having had the thing around (and thereby make yourself better able to detect its reappearance)? Do you expunge the thing from the entire database? It seems good general practice to have a place where one can keep old records that no longer point to something retrievable. Would it be wise to allow people to search and find that an item had been intentionally removed, to save them the trouble of searching and searching for it? Or would it be ethically questionable to have even just the record available, since it could give people the idea to seek it elsewhere or create copycat works? I’m guessing the videos will appear elsewhere on the net, and there is little anyone can do to keep them out of public view, but keeping them off popular sites could effectively marginalize them. I’m thinking the benefit of keeping something truly nasty beyond the view of the “tell me something about …” searcher outweighs the benefit of explaining the removal to the “I want this exact document” searcher.
Nick Rabinowitz Said,
November 16, 2008 @ 12:55 pm
It’s a really good question. I’m inclined to the “leave a record of the expungement” idea – delete the record, keep the metadata, and keep a record of the deletion and its reasons. Though it really depends on your reasons for deleting – for example, if your purpose (as it is here) is to maintain public norms, then it behooves you to explain your actions and keep the record around. If your purpose is safeguarding secrets, you might well take the full-and-total-deletion approach.
This question reminds me of an interesting NPR story on patents for the atomic bomb: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89127786 . The government had an interest in filing the patents, to make sure they controlled the IP, but though they could keep the applications themselves secret, they still had this problem of metadata records potentially rendering the project visible to a clever observer – if you tried to file a patent for something similar, you might get a response that allowed you to intuit the existence of the secret patents. It’s a slightly different issue, but it comes down to the same question – how does a public collection deal with non-public records, and what’s the trade-off between making a record public but restricting its access legally and trying to keep the record private? This question will come up in 205 as well, in the trade-off between patents and trade secrets.