Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's practical to expect to be forgotten. Archives will save webpages, and mistakes are interesting to science.

As tech continues to improve, we will increasingly face a world where there are no secrets. I don't see this as preventable. Everyone has a camera in their pocket, and soon it might be on their face a la Google Glass or Microsoft Holo Lens.

Instead we have to learn to live with it. I think that every single person in this thread can think of a dozen things they wouldn't want made public. For each they fear something between judgement and prosecution. The ability to hide those things is disappearing though.

My thought is that a cultural shift towards leniency and forgiveness is going to be by far an easier path than enforced privacy. Not that shifting culture is an easy path. But I don't see fighting technology as a battle that can be won.

Cameras will be everywhere, streams will be accessible to everyone, and it's all going to be archived and remembered. And not just physical life, but digital life as well.

"As tech continues to improve, we will increasingly face a world where there are no secrets. I don't see this as preventable"

It's absolutely preventable, we just have to make the choice to do that.

Of course - there are 'some bits of data' that will get persisted here and there, but by enlarge, there's ways to do this:

1) Policy 2) Common ethics 3) Regulation 4) Architecture 5) Law

If it became 'policy' at most companies to address this issue, there are a number of things they could do.

If it there was awareness about this - and it was framed as a moral issue, large swaths of organizations might simply make do.

Identity/Software/Systems architecture may be able to enable this - i.e. being able to make online transactions without actually identifying oneself.

Responsible regulations and responsible law could urge companies to do this.

Obvious, it will never be fully thus - but there are a lot of things that we could do.

Starting with: any account you open, you should be able to close and have all relevant information erased, unless there is some special requirement otherwise.

This is law in some places and it's not entirely unreasonable.

If we collectively made the choice we could make the internet 'mostly' a private experience for people.

I think your examples are muddying up the discussion. Your 2 examples of:

>Identity/Software/Systems architecture may be able to enable this - i.e. being able to make online transactions without actually identifying oneself.

>Starting with: any account you open, you should be able to close and have all relevant information erased

... is not what OP (danaliv) you're replying to nor The Right To Be Forgotten[1] is conceptually about.

Your examples are about transactions getting erased. E.g. if a woman creates a Facebook account and posts some selfies, she should later be able to delete that social account and Facebook would erase the associated photos. It would not do further data mining on her profile.

RTBF is about erasing negative or embarrassing information. E.g. President George W Bush was arrested for drunk driving in 1976. RTBF would require Google, Bing, New York Times, Wayback Machine,etc to remove that information so people couldn't find it. Bush's arrest isn't a private transaction with a company -- it was a publicized incident that RTBF wants to erase. Would the (ideal) compliance of the law also require citizens who wrote personal emails such as "I won't be voting for Bush because of his drunk driving arrest" to delete that from their email archives? What about discussion forums (Usenet/reddit/HN/blogs/etc) where people talked about his arrest?

Erasing the Facebook account is a trivial implementation. In contrast, erasing Bush's arrest from the public mind is only solvable for centralized institutions such as the Google search index or The New York Times archives. All the decentralized nodes of information will not comply.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten

> It's absolutely preventable, we just have to make the choice to do that.

Hear, hear!

> but by enlarge

It's "by and large". https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/by%20and%20large

> ... any account you open, you should be able to close and have all relevant information erased, unless there is some special requirement otherwise.

> This is law in some places and it's not entirely unreasonable.

Its absolutely unreasonable (eg) for HN. And this is just one form of information processing.

Regardless, it's the way things are done in at least one country[1]. This only covers "personally identifiable information" though. Especially this paragraph is noteworthy:

>(8) Disagreement with processing pursuant to paragraph 6(c) must be expressed by the data subject in writing. The controller shall be obliged to notify each controller to whom he has transferred the name, surname and address of the data subject of the fact that the data subject has expressed disagreement with the processing.

What this means, is that if telemarketers call you, you just say that you require them to erase your data, and notify everyone they gave the data to erase it too. And you never hear from any telemarketers again. (At least in my experience, it says the disagreement has to be in writing, but they probably err on the side of caution.)

1 - https://www.uoou.cz/en/vismo/zobraz_dok.asp?id_ktg=1107

I don't agree at all.

It's neither unreasonable nor entirely impractical from a mechanical perspective once it's thought through a little bit.

Because comments are made here effectively anonymously, I don't see the issue, but it's not at all unreasonable that comments could be removed given a mandate.

Giving every HN user power to delete all his comments will make HN unreadable. To understand a comment, access to all ancestor comments is needed.

I don't know, I often encounter [flagged] or whatever it is that happens to bad comments in the middle of a thread. It leaves me wondering what was actually said.

So it happens already, just for different reasons...

You can turn on [showdead] in your profile to see flagged comments.

Ah, I hadn't realised that!

There shouldn't be a need to delete one's comments to achieve a right to be forgotten, only to remove the identifier of the user who made them.

"Giving every HN user power to delete all his comments will make HN unreadable."

No, I think it would be so rare it would not make a difference.

For that 'small intrusion' on your HN experience, you get a hefty dose of privacy and security protection.

I would gladly agree if HN allowed people to 'delete all comments'.

What scientific value does a drunk post on your exes facebook wall after a bad breakup exactly has?

What value does some hot mic slip of the tongue has?

Shift towards forgiveness isn't something you want to strive too it can create a very bad society where there are virtually no social norms or regards towards other human beings since everything has to be forgiven.

> What scientific value does a drunk post on your exes facebook wall after a bad breakup exactly has?

More than a historic record consisting only of favorable "truths" worded as carefully as an obituary, because everything else has been erased in a race to spotlessness.

Yes because when contemplating about a person's life what is important is what they wrote on the facebook of their former partner in their 20's....

You do understand that "whitewashing" obituaries isn't for the dead, it's for the living when a person dies most socially adjusted people rather remember the good not the bad. It's not to adjust history in anyone's favor it's to be able to grief in peace.

>> "My thought is that a cultural shift towards leniency and forgiveness is going to be by far an easier path than enforced privacy."

Things seem to be shifting the other way to me. The internet has given people the ability to enact vigilante justice easier than ever before.

I basically agree with you.

> I think that every single person in this thread can think of a dozen things they wouldn't want made public.

While privacy is definitely going away as we watch, secrecy is alive and well. For both private and secret data, an unrelated person would have difficulty uncovering the information, but privacy is a public good (people who have no inherent interest in hiding the data have access to it), whereas secrecy is a private good.

Those who truly value keeping information about themselves non-public will have to work to keep or make it secret.

What about the rights of the person wronged by someone else to remember, and to tell their story?

Someone who committed a sexual assault, for example, might have served their time and feel like they have changed and deserve a new start. They might want the record of their assault expunged from the Internet.

What about the victim, though? Are they not allowed to keep telling their story, and to tell people who assaulted them? Are they not allowed to warn someone that the person they are dating has assaulted someone in the past? Does the new dating partner not have a right to be warned that their new fling has assaulted people in the past?

I don't think their is a way to enforce the right to be forgotten while preserving the right to tell your story to whomever you please.

If you do something bad that you wish would be forgotten, it isn't up to you to decide when other people have to forgive you and move on. It is the other people's rights to remember as long as they want.

You say you should try to imagine what it would be like to do the hard work to right your wrongs, but you also need to imagine what it would be like to be wronged and then be told that the person who wronged you has the right not to have the wrong known.

Don't you think that the person who committed the crime and served the sentence has had enough of a punishment and deserves to lead a normal life? How long should one carry that on their back? At the end of the day, both the wronged and person who wronged should move on. There should be something called "fair punishment". Otherwise some people who were wronged will never be satisfied by anything other than death sentence.

You're dodging the point. Does the victim have a right to remember and tell people about their experience, or do they not? What they "should" do is irrelevant to a question of law.

It depends. `tell people about their experience` ranges from talking about it with a counselor, friend or family to continuous harassment of the condemned-but-now-reformed's colleagues and friends. Which is starting to look like revenge and has nothing to do with the right to remember.

So, what do you really mean by `tell people about their experience` ?

No, I am not. Victim's right to remember doesn't have anything to do with the person's right to be forgotten unless they are in the same social circle. The question is not to erase memories out of people's mind but whether to continue creating those memories in others.

"creating memories in others" is what's commonly known as speech. Do victims have this right or not?

Of course, no one is taking away their right to speech. But all those news articles that came out when the culprit was being investigated need not be there to always remind them of their past.

So if I am starting to date someone, I don't have a right to know they were convicted of sexual assault ten years ago?

Correct.

Society has dealt out its punishment to the perpetrator and moved on, it owes you nothing.

I think the judicial system ought to be free to expunge its records when they have outlived their usefulness in the judicial system. However, a mechanism to force another to expunge its records because a third-party objects seems to me an extreme position.

Just because society has dealt out its punishment doesn't mean the perpetrator has had their history erased. Society might not owe me something, but it also doesn't have the right to censor information from me that might be relevant to my safety.

They are in the same social circle: It's called the Internet.

I don't think it is up to us to decide how long someone should go before "moving on." That is deeply personal, and any length of time we set is going to be too short for some people.

Obviously, we set a punishment that is fair in terms of what society gives (jail sentence, fines, etc). But what is fair in terms of the sentiment your peers feel towards you? That is up to each person to decide on their own. You don't get to tell someone they have to forgive someone else, or that they have to move on. They are allowed to hold a grudge for life if they feel it is justified.

Obviously, allowing them to hold a grudge doesn't mean they get carte blanche to harass the person. If they send threats, stalk, harass, or tell lies about the person, they should be held liable and stopped. But if they want to tell TRUTHS about what the person did, and explain to others why they don't think they are worthy of forgiveness, they have that right.

Just imagine the different possibilities. Say a drunk driver kills your child; the law might only send him to jail for a few years, but I have every right to not forgive him for life. If I run into him in the store, I have a right to tell the people around me that he killed my kid. I have a right to write a blog post about why he shouldn't be forgiven. No one has the right to tell me to 'move on'.

> I don't think it is up to us to decide how long someone should go before "moving on." That is deeply personal, and any length of time we set is going to be too short for some people.

The question of what a persons' internal emotional state should be, is a wholly separate topic from removing online records of an event.

It's like juvenile crimes. The event still happened. People will still remember, and no one will stop them from talking publicly about the topic but past the date of the criminals 18th birthday, but the public records are simply sealed.

RTBF, as it is currently implemented, is extremely similar. The past events still occurred, people can still talk about it publicly, but mentions of them are excluded from public search engines.

Removing online records from public searches is troublesome to me.

From our example, if our accident victim writes a blog post about crime and why they haven't forgiven them, would that have to be removed from public search engines? Lets say the incident in question was some corruption charge (like say, police officers taking bribes), would articles that talk about that corruption have to be purged or censored? If so, that means that we would lose the ability to learn from that history and change our practices (for example, when people say 'no need to worry about bribe taking, Officer Joe Smith is such a nice guy!', we couldn't then read up on the time Officer John Doe, who was also a very nice guy, took bribes)

I really think any attempt to censor or whitewash the past is doomed to be abused and cause problems. Facts need to be able to be shared, no matter what harm they may cause. Hiding the truth is a dangerous precedent to set.

See, going about it rationally makes sense if you ignore human impact of such decisions. If that officer already got punished for his crime and learnt his lesson, why do you want to hold it on his head forever? We want people to learn and we want to give them a second chance.

We also want to be able to protect ourselves from people who are dangerous; how do you know the person has 'learnt his lesson', and is no longer dangerous? Yes, we should give people a chance at redemption, but we need to do it with eyes wide open, being vigilant to protect ourselves from the person doing it again.

Sounds like you're saying they shouldn't be forgiven. And the right to be forgotten applies to Google search, not criminal records.

I will make a second comment, highlighting what I understand the core argument of the article to be. Each country should be allowed to decide on their own what tradeoffs they make when it comes to censoring information. (Right to be forgotten is censorship).

France should be free to enforce that right, and America should be free to reject such censorship. France should not have the power to force America to censor their citizens because France has decided that data infringes upon a person's rights. Substitute for any two or more countries you desire.

These two requirements : that France should enforce that right, and that america should not, cannot cohabitate in a space such as the internet : either the info is available somewhere and everyone can access it with minimum effort, or it isn't and no one can access it.

A very similar process is US' IRS asking foreign banks to disclose the activity of US citizen, and strong-arming foreign countries to enforce this on their banks. Does it look like the US is making a jurisdictional overreach ? Yes. Do they have another way to make sure their domestic law is applied ? No.

Maybe I'm confused but France couldn't make America do anything. The question is, can France tell a company "you can't operate here if you're going to do X in Y country" which it already can generally, just maybe it's a good idea/not a good idea in this case.

But then there is the problem that "operating here" generally means "you have a legal entity in our jurisdiction", the point being "we'll throw the executives of your legal entity in our country to jail if you don't comply".

However, that is a very different thing from French people being able to access some Internet service outside France. It's even a different thing from being able to restrict cash flow to an Internet service that you don't like, particularly in the context of EU which intends to ensure free movement of capital, goods and employees within the union.

The only way for France to enforce access restrictions would be to build a Great Firewall of France, similar to other more authoritarian countries, and do they want to wreck the EU to do it?

(Yes, France appears just a little bit authoritarian in my eyes.)

(Yes, France appears just a little bit authoritarian in my eyes.)

France has been in a continuous state of emergency for more than a year, and there is talk of extending it (I think this would be the fourth time) for another six months to cover the election period next year as well.

During such a state of emergency, the executive gains considerable extra powers, with provisions made for measures such as curfews, house arrests, the prohibition of public gatherings, censorship of the press, and searches and seizures without the usual judicial oversight.

So yes, I think it's reasonable to suggest that France is an authoritarian state at the moment.

Correct, the state of emergency will be extended: http://en.rfi.fr/france/20161116-france-extend-state-emergen...

However, IMO, on the scale of authoritarianism, France does not still score very high - it's not like Turkey, not to mention Russia or Arab countries. But its advocating the right to be forgotten is another worrying sign here.

As far as authoritarianism goes, hopefully no-one would seriously claim that France or, say, the UK or US, is a similar living environment in practice to somewhere like various Arab states or Russia. However, it is still worrying that so many legal principles and government powers are being set up in disturbingly similar ways in the West lately, even if the current administrations are only using those powers in a small number of cases. There's definitely an element of the general population who aren't in certain demographic groups assuming that "it will never happen to me" and so condoning official powers or behaviour towards other people that they would never accept if they thought there was a significant chance that they or their own loved ones would be on the receiving end. I don't believe that is healthy for important issues like civil rights and government accountability.

As for the right to be forgotten itself, I personally have no problem with the basic principle that the CJEU seems to have established in the original case, and as it's an EU wide issue, I'm not sure how France's advocacy is any sort of threat to any cross-border provisions that come along with the EU. I don't see why France can or should be able to compel people in other jurisdictions to follow the same rules, absent some proper agreement with the other jurisdiction that those same rules will apply there, though.

Unfortunately, the logical conclusion if everyone sticks to their positions would be that the EU really might start trying to block traffic to and from sites hosted elsewhere that don't respect the same principles when it comes to issues like privacy. If you think about it, it's actually quite remarkable that the Internet has remained as open as it has for so long, but that same openness has also created a kind of lawlessness online that increasingly has negative and sometimes serious consequences in the real world, and sooner or later something has to give. Personally, I hope it won't come to anything as dramatic as a Great Firewall of Europe or the like, but it's a fine line that a large, international organisation like Google is being asked to walk here.

But what about my Right to Remember ?

This is the world we now live in. We have to get used to it. Its a disadvantage but a disadvantage faced by everyone.

This is the world we now live in. We have to get used to it.

Why? The problem here is a little bit someone's right to remember (which is in no way undermined by the CJEU ruling) and a lot the tools that artificially help everyone to find information they never knew in the first place.

Its a disadvantage but a disadvantage faced by everyone.

We're all subject to police powers and the criminal justice system, too, but statistically speaking it seems some of us are more subject to them than others.

The press are equally free to report on all of us and under the same professional obligations to print retractions if they make mistakes, but it turns out that the retractions tend to be more prominent when it's a celebrity with the resources to bring a multi-million defamation lawsuit than when it was the local school teacher whose name was coincidentally the same as a convicted paedophile in last week's front page report where they included the teacher's photo by mistake.

> ... a lot the tools that artificially help everyone to find information they never knew in the first place.

If the information is already legally public, there is no case. If its illegally obtained then there already exist laws that covers it.

> ... statistically speaking it seems some of us are more subject to them than others.

But google IS displaying info indiscriminately what RTBF doing is distort that perfection.

If the information is already legally public, there is no case.

The original "right to be forgotten" case heard by the CJEU was essentially that information was already out there but was no longer fairly representative of the individual concerned and that this resulted in harm to that individual.

But google IS displaying info indiscriminately what RTBF doing is distort that perfection.

But Google is not the whole picture here.

This issue primarily affects people who have incorrect or misleading information about them floating around on the Internet. That situation may or may not have been their fault in any way, but it nevertheless makes them much more vulnerable in this sense.

The operation of a site like Google, if it perpetuates such information without ensuring its appropriateness first, then dramatically increases the resulting vulnerability, which the individual still may or may not actually deserve.

In other contexts, if you repeat a harmful lie about someone, you are as guilty of defamation as whoever told you that lie in the first place. I see no compelling argument that the same should not apply to online search tools, just because it's inconvenient for their business model of automating everything with minimal human interactions.

IANAL, but, for comparison, in Spain the right to privacy may be superseded if there are good reasons of public interest. For example, the daily stories of the average Joe’s life are covered by the right to privacy, but the same details for a major politician might be not, in the proper circumstances. It’s not always a black and white issue, but something to be decided at court.

Regarding the article, I’m not familiar enough with the "Right to be Forgotten" directive to question the choosing of the examples opening the text, but to me it seems biased. These examples are arguably the kind of information which couldn’t be legally hidden because of public interest.

The fact that the disadvantage is faced by everyone doesn't really have anything to do with whether or not we should accept a standard. Saying "this is how the world is" is obviously also not valid...

Keep in mind that the disadvantage is faced by everyone, but those who are ACTUALLY impacted are often devastated.

  Saying "this is how the world is" is obviously also not valid...

It depends on what you mean by "how the world is". If you're taking about some mutable aspect, then it's invalid. But if, as in this case, you're talking about the fundamental dynamics, then you'd best get used to it. If you fight reality, you're going to lose.

Never understood this.

You aren't who you were in the past and it's in your hands to evaluate who you have been.

If I meet a former neo nazi, who reflected on their doings and changed their mind, I have much more respect for them than for someone who did always good stuff and never did any introspection...

What if that neo-nazi beat up a Jewish guy and left him with brain damage? Sure, they might have reformed and changed their ways, but the victim is still suffering. Your past doesn't just go away when you reform.

Then he was in prison and has been resocialized. That's what prison is for and when your prison sentence is over your dues have been paid, history is history.

>You aren't who you were in the past and it's in your hands to evaluate who you have been.

It's also in my hands and the hands of everyone else. If someone's done terrible things in the past he's the sort of person who's capable of doing terrible things, and I'd rather know when that's the case.

> It's also in my hands and the hands of everyone else. If someone's done terrible things in the past he's the sort of person who's capable of doing terrible things

Everyone is capable of doing terrible things. The idea that some people are capable and others are not is naive at best. The assumption that someone who has done terrible things is more likely to do them again than someone who didn't do terrible things (or wasn't caught doing them) has no base in reality. It is simply pondering to the lizard part of our brains "you must fear the evil ... fear the evil .."

I don't believe this is true. Most people have enough moral fortitude there are lines they will not cross except to prevent a greater evil.

"Neo Nazi changes their mind" doesn't exactly make news headlines, so you would be unlikely to find out. IMHO, this asymmetry is what RTBF helps to balance.

You can be arrested without probable cause and still not be able to expunge the record at all, as in not even be able to request so in court, so I wouldn't exactly call it a right.

I don't think your "a couple of short decades ago" holds; Merle Haggard was singing about it in the 60s:

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/merlehaggard/brandedman.html

Except, that is you look at most of the cases for this state ordered censorhip for example France ("right" puts this ar the same level than human righths and it's not), it's mostly about politics trying to erase a bad past. Don't be fooled.

Do you have a source of that? Or are those only the cases you heard about?

https://www.egaliteetreconciliation.fr/66-droits-a-l-oubli-d...

It's french, but 224 french politicians asked to remove content about them thanks to "Right to be forgotten".

How many other people?