Time to Push for 'Erasable Internet'

So what lessons can we glean from the Sony hack? How about this for starters: Never use a "digital device to say anything to anyone, ever," suggests Farhad Manjoo at the New York Times. That's if you have any desire of privacy, anyway. Nothing is protected in our email-centric world as it currently exists, writes Manjoo. Nothing. We can shrug and live with it or finally move toward something he calls the "erasable Internet."

Think apps such as Snapchat and Confide, the latter designed to delete emails in the corporate environment as soon as they are read. These are promising steps, but we've still got a long way to go, writes Manjoo. "Despite the increasing popularity of programs that don’t store all of our data by default, almost everything we do on computers today is recorded and stored somewhere, often in places over which we don’t have any control." His advice: For the foreseeable future, assume anything you post online is open to the public. But to change that, "agitate for a world in which saving is not the default." Click for the full column. (More online privacy stories.)