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First came the news this week that Amazon had angered customers of its Kindle electronic book service, by remotely deleting two of George Orwell's books, Animal Farm and 1984. It seems Amazon allowed the books to be uploaded from a publisher that didn't have the rights to the books, so it simply deleted them.
Now comes word that researchers have developed a way to make electronic messages "self destruct" after a period of time.
A group of computer scientists at the University of Washington, have developed new software dubbed "Vanish" which takes advantage of encryption technology. Apparently, it allows a message to automatically be encrypted after a specified period of time. The message, therefore, isn't exactly destroyed, but it can no longer be read.
"...There is a pre-specified timeout associated with each encrypted/encapsulated messages," noted a website at the university. "Prior to the timeout, anyone can read the encrypted/encapsulated message. After the timeout, no one can read that message, because the encryption key is lost due to a set of both natural and programmed processes. It is therefore impossible for anyone to decrypt/decapsulate that email after the timer expires."
The technology can be applied to more than just email, and the researchers say Vanish could be used to control the lifespan of any type of data stored in the cloud, including information in blogs, on Facebook, or Google documents. The software certainly could have come in handy for the folks at Twitter who suffered an embarrassing breach into their Google documents account and had sensitive financial documents stolen.
The technology will be welcomed by many public companies that are under increasing pressure to protect the privacy of information. But it does raise a number of thorny legal issues.
The biggest question: it's not clear how this technology will play with electronic discovery laws currently on the books. Those statutes require corporations to archive emails and make them accessible at a later date.
Moreover, it's unclear whether the creators or Mission Impossible may sue for patent infringement.
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