Lancastria.net Yea Blackburn!

Imagine if every time you sent a letter, the postman made a copy. Or whenever you printed photos, the chemist kept a set for himself. This isn’t 1950s Russia but the internet today. Every e-mail you send is stored on not only your computer but also the recipient’s machine; your internet service provider (ISP) will have one too, as will the many servers that have handled your message in its travels across cyberspace. And the government is allowed, under a European commission directive, to dip into some of that data.

It’s this Big Brother vision that has inspired researchers in Seattle to create the world’s first self-destructing e-mails. Vanish, a free program developed by Roxana Geambasu and Professor Hank Levy of The University of Washington, puts an expiry date on digital messages. Eight hours after being sent, Vanish e-mails become unreadable — even to the person who wrote them.

Levy says his software is a response to the fact that the digital world has forgotten how to forget. “Storage is now incredibly cheap and there’s really no need to delete data any more,” he explains. “Personal data last for a long time.” A recent survey found that a fifth of Americans had written something online that they regretted, while almost one in eight teenagers had posted nude or revealing photos of themselves. In the digital age, these acts remain a permanent, and potentially life-ruining, blot on the record.

Personal e-mails, perhaps containing bank or credit card details, can also linger online for years. “You can’t ensure an e-mail is really deleted because you don’t really control it,” Levy says. “Your e-mail company might store it on back-up tape. A judge could issue a subpoena to get old e-mails or a hacker could break in and steal them. They could be revealed with a system error or someone could simply have their laptop stolen.”

Encrypting your e-mails is no guarantee of privacy, either. In 2007, Hushmail, a company that describes itself as offering the most secure webmail service, admitted to deciphering coded messages and turning them over to Canadian police as part of a drug investigation. In the UK, suspects have been forced to turn over e-mail encryption passwords to the courts or face jail.