The Atos IT Challenge

The Atos IT Challenge is a worldwide innovation challenge, opened to IT students. It takes place every year since 2012, and involves designing and developing a novel smartphone application revolving around a yearly theme, in teams of three or four students. This year, 15 teams were selected from 54 initial submissions, with among them English, Korean, Indian, Senegalese, Malaysians, Thai, German, Spanish, Moroccan and French students!

I took part in the 2016 edition, in the team WebSight. The theme this year was "the right to be forgotten", a relatively new concept put into practice in Europe for example, which allows an individual to ask for the removal of certain harmful internet records, linked to past events in life that are no longer occurring. For instance, you may have heard about Google's right to be forgotten form, which can be used to ask the search engine to remove specific result queries that include your name.

This article aim at presenting the concept we came up with, and the results of the contest. You can also check our code on github

GitHub logo

The right to be forgotten

The main practical application of the right to be forgotten which affects you is the control of your online persona. The tracks you leave while browsing the web, the details you often input to access a new service, the information you disclose on social networks, form a more or less accurate reflection of who you are. If you have never done it, just google your name. It will give you an idea of the opinion a recruitment consultant or your next date could make up of you before even meeting you.

You can take two approaches to control your online persona: to prevent, or to cure.

The first one is more efficient, but requires a constant attention, and most importantly a certain awareness of this issue. You just have to be careful of what you, your friends and relatives put online.

The second one is much more tedious, but become the only solution if you did not apply the first one before. It involves finding all the information about you online, then removing the ones which are damaging your reputation, by enforcing your right to be forgotten. But that is easier said than done, here is a non-exhaustive list of potential roadblocks:

The web is immense, immensely immense. If you spend several hours in front of your computer, smartphone or tablet every day, you can expect to find hundreds of pages containing personal information about you.

Most of the services you use have no interest in deleting your personal data since they are selling them to publicists. Even though the European laws sometimes force them to do so if you ask, there is nothing compelling them to make the removal process easy. Hence, expect an account deletion link to be hidden among advanced options, or tiny footer mentions (if it even exists).

Your right to be forgotten can conflict with other people's right to be informed, or right to expression. If it does, an arbitration may result in an unfavorable result for you. For example, you can see here that Google has removed less than half the URL it evaluated until now.

Finally, because this issue is relatively new, you will not be able to take advantage of many tools. You will probably need to manually search through dozens of results obtained by googling your name, then find out how to delete the embarrassing ones by yourself. You will only be able to use lists of account removal links, or a automatic filling tool for right to be forgotten forms. There is a simple reason to that: no software can guess the judgment you make on a page, if it bothers you that a given detail concerning you is available online for example.

WebSight

The main idea behind WebSight was the following: if you cannot find anything compromising your image online, then no one can. Right, so how to get to that point? You need to find all the information about you online, then remove the ones which are bothering you. And you are the one best able to do this because you know yourself better than anyone: it is up to you to take back control over your online persona.

Our ambition was to develop a new tool, which would make this task easier. This tool would not do miracle, it would not delete all the compromising information for you, but it would find them for you in minutes, when it would take you hours to do it. It would then be up to you to judge which information damages your image, and to remove it, using custom pieces of advice generated by our application.

How would this tool work? You would make it smart, by inputting the pieces of information about you that you wanted to look for. If you wanted to make sure that your phone number is not available online, you input it. If you did not want your name linked to a certain person's: you input it. If you needed to know if your birth date, which is part of all your passwords, was online: you input it.

After some automated searches, the application would allow you to visualize the link between your name and the pieces of information you input earlier, thanks to a graph. You would then be able to get advice about the destruction of a link by clicking on it.

Finally, the real strength of Websight was that it enabled you to subscribe to a monitoring service: the same searches would be performed regularly on our servers, and you would be notified directly on your smartphone of any change. It would allow you to check if your removal actions were successful, and to monitor the appearance of new damaging pages.

Results

In June 2016, we were delighted to learn that we were selected for the finals! In July, we spent 3 days in Paris, learning more about Atos and meeting with the other 2 finalist teams. This great event came to an end with a final ceremony at the "Palais de la Découverte", were we were awared with the third place.