In 70-odd years your grandchildren will be able to see how you and grandma met on Dating.dk.

According to metroxpress, the state is monitoring everyone’s behaviour on the internet as a result of legislation that requires all user names and passwords to be lodged with the State and University Library and the Royal Library. The libraries file everything from children’s scribblings on Arto.dk to love letters and profile pictures on Dating.dk.

The technology is known as Internet Harvesting and the Net Archive currently harvests all Danish sites four times per year.

However, some news, dating and other social network sites are harvested daily, according to Eva Fønns-Jørgensen of the Net Archive at the State and University Library in Århus.

Code release
“Danish sites have a legal duty to provide access codes and we have been harvesting text, pictures and audio since 2005,” she says.

At the moment, researchers are the only ones allowed to see the extensive personal material grabbed through Internet Harvesting. But 70 years after the death of, for example, a person with a dating profile, all information comes into the public domain.

Agency concerned
The Danish Data Protection Agency already expressed concerns about Internet harvesting back in 2004 when Parliament gave the go-ahead to harvest personal information from the internet for posterity.

“We were critical of the proposed legislation then and issued a critical declaration. This was in consideration for those individuals whose personal data is registered. But it’s the law – and that’s it,” says The Danish Data Protection Agency Director Janni Christoffersen.

The State and University Library sees no reason to criticise registration.

“It’s people themselves who have chosen to put material on the Internet. Access to our archives is very restrictive, and it’s not until someone has been dead for quite some while that the material is released,” says Eva Fønns-Jørgensen.