User:Michaela/thesis

Draft_ thesis plan:

QUESTIONS I WANT TO ADDRESS IN MY ESSAY

#problem_aspect #1
THEME: PRIVACY IN DIGITAL REALM
The ethical issue I want to address is: who has the right to withdrawal someone's data and how this data could be used, reused or misused?

#problem_aspect #2
THEME: AUTHORSHIP/CO-AUTHORSHIP/ MULTIPLEAUTHORS
The problematic aspect of the recovered data: who is the actual author of the final work?

INTRO

How do we leave a trace of an online presence? The amount of traces/ digital traces in form of caches, cookies, footprint of the browser is stored, tracked and dumped in the system. Various tools – PGP (encrypting your email), browser plug- ins, private networks (VPN) – are used to prevent our location to be tracked, our data to be exposed. All of which limits the traces we leave but it doesn't completely erase them. Driven by my personal motivation to explore the limitations of technology and different methods of resistance I became sceptic about the possibility of being able to not leave traces or in other words the (im)possibility to erase the digital footprint. The common methods to erase files from systems do not delete them permanently. Those files remain hidden, abandoned in hard drives. The traces left remain present within time in the medium, allowing to be retrieved and becoming a subject of study.

THECHNICAL ASPECT

The discovered cluster must be treated as an ideal representation of data that could be used as a way of recovering the original data back from the “ideal” format. This is the idea of data recovery approach: not only to use the data for finding clusters but also to use the clusters for recovering data. In a general situation, the data recovered from the sumarized custers can not fit the original data exactly, which can be due to various factors such as present of noise in the data.

Data Entry: research on how to completely erase your data from the operating system. rmv command does not delete the file permanently" or non-restorative. I found indulging the fact that there is a command line "shred" ( available only on linux ), poorly used because of its damaging consequences. Shred erases all the information, by overwriting 20 times or so. There is no "shred" command in OS x instead there is a replacement or security remove command called srm. In comparison with Mac OS x, based on Unix system, a file could be overwritten only three times at the time. In relationship to that I find interesting approach of how to defeat the privace issue by information overflow or noising the channel, by overwriting something infinitive times instead of trying to denoise it.

'data erasure' term - or the only way to erase data permanently is physically to destroy a hard disk drive. In the past shredders were used to destroy confidential, secret papers now there are replaces by data shredders.

Questions about e-waste and digital recycling, digital trash and data recycling. Except the physical implementation of data storage of digital trash camps outrageously sent to remote areas in Africa nevertheless there is the ethical issue or who has the right to intervene with someone's data!

PRACTICE – BASED

Descriptions of previous projects