Internet is great for finding stuff. This is possible because the users (meaning you and me) stock enormous amounts of data online that is exploited by clever search algorithms capable of identifying relationships. Post a piece of information, a photo, a video, an article, your credit card details, anything on the internet and within minutes it has been absorbed by all kinds of information collecting systems to be remembered forever. So what to do if you want to be forgotten?

Removing a piece of information is not enough to make "The System" forget because the data has not only been stored, it has also been consumed. In order to be completely forgotten, the data itself must of course be deleted but also its so-called lineage. Doing this requires advanced machine unlearning algorithms. Researchers Yinzhi Cao and Junfeng Yang of Columbia University propose a new kind of unlearning algorithm based on a technique that makes learning systems only stock incremental data instead of the ...