Abstract
Forgetting, losing, or corrupting data is almost universally
considered harmful in computer science and blasphemous in
database and file systems. Typically, loss of data is a consequence
of unmanageable or unexpected lower layer deficiencies
that the user process must be protected from through
multiple layers of storage abstractions and redundancies. We
argue that forgetfulness can be a resource for system design
and that, like durability, security or integrity, can be used to
achieve uncommon, but potentially important goals such as
privacy, plausible deniability, and the right to be forgotten.
We define the key properties of forgetfulness and draw inspiration
from human memory. We develop a data structure,
the forgit, that can be used to store images, audio files, videos
or numerical data and eventually forget. Forgits are a natural
data store for a multitude of today’s cloud-based applications
and we discuss their use, effectiveness, and limitations
in this paper.
Materials