Why Deleting Personal Information On The Internet Is A Fool's Errand

[Commentary] The hack of the "dating" site AshleyMadison.com, which threatens to expose the personal information of millions of people who may be cheating on their spouses, was initially met with snark. So what if some alleged cheaters are going to be exposed, right? But the hackers' reasons for holding the information hostage were not actually about the sanctity of marriage vows -- in fact, they point to a much deeper and more widespread issue. In short, can any data you hand over to a faceless online company ever truly be removed?

Americans want privacy online, and in the post-Edward Snowden/NSA era, we’re more vocal than ever about that, even if we may have no clue how to get what we want. According to a Pew Research Center study, 93 percent of adults said it’s important that they be able to control who can access information about them, and 90 percent said controlling what information is gathered about them is also important. It’s clear, though, that once we put information online, on banking sites, on medical sites, on dating sites, and on social media sites, we may lose that control. Ashley Madison promised to delete users’ information if they ponied up $19, but The Impact Team insists it fails to do so. In the end, it may well come down to a question of who do we actually believe when something like this -- the complete deletion of your data -- is so difficult to prove.