InstantDB: Enforcing Timely Degradation of Sensitive Data

People cannot prevent personal information from being collected by various actors. Several security measures are implemented on servers to minimize the possibility of a privacy violation. Unfortunately, even the most well defended servers are subject to attacks and however much one trusts a hosting organism/company, such trust does not last forever. We propose a simple and practical degradation model where sensitive data undergoes a progressive and irreversible degradation from an accurate state at collection time, to intermediate but still informative fuzzy states, to complete disappearance. We introduce the data degradation model and identify related technical challenges and open issues.