Digital Data Make For A Really Permanent Record

Information doesn't fade the way it used to. Documents that once upon a time could be counted on to be filed and forgotten are now finding an afterlife in digital, searchable form. Roxana Geambasu is a computer science graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she's been working on self-destructing data. The simplest application is a form of e-mail that comes with a finite life span. The system is called Vanish, and it works by encrypting your data — e-mails, photos, Facebook posts — then placing the decryption "keys" in several places around the Internet. The keys are readily available to anyone for a few hours. But as the keys disappear, the message rots away. All copies become unreadable; even the copies made along the way — at the Internet service provider, at the National Security Agency, wherever.