Ongedempt

Ongedempt is a neologism used in discussions of information theory, digital privacy, and memory management to denote the deliberate, systematic removal of transient or non-essential data from a system in order to minimize stored information. The term is typically used as a noun but can appear in discussion as a description of a process or design principle.

The origin of ongedempt is uncertain; it emerged in online and academic discourse in the 2010s and 2020s, often in debates about privacy-preserving architectures, stateless services, and data governance. It is generally treated as a coined term rather than deriving from a known language, and its usage varies across disciplines.

In practice, ongedempt-like strategies are described as part of data minimization and ephemeral storage policies. Implementations may include automatic purging of transient logs, short-lived caches, or cryptographic methods that require disposal of keys to prevent data recovery. In theory, the concept is used to illustrate the balance between data availability and privacy, and the limits of reproducibility in computational systems.

Reception is mixed. Proponents argue that ongedempt provides a useful framing for privacy-by-design and for designing systems with bounded memory, while critics caution that the term can be underspecified and overlap with established concepts such as deletion regimes and data minimization.

Related topics include data minimization, ephemeral data, stateless architecture, and privacy by design.