Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I'm the exact opposite: I believe that history should never be rewritten nor forgotten. The increasing "transientness" of information is, quite frankly, extremely scary --- when future historians looking back may see only a whitewashed representation of what things were really like.

Besides, Google forgets enough even without being told to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840

View on HN

Why should history not be forgotten? It used it be that way all the time before we managed to build information storage large enough to capture this huge amount of data. And at what cost does it come that we never forget? Not all too long ago (1993-1997), there was a large trial against 25 people for alleged child abuse in germany. (1) All were eventually cleared, one person died while in prison before the trial ended. It was one of the largest case of false accusations for child abuse. The names were all over the press. Should those people not have the right to have that memory fade? To have history be forgotten at some point?

> Besides, Google forgets enough even without being told to:

That was not the case when the laws were drafted and enacted.

(Wormser Prozesse, sorry, german only https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormser_Prozesse)

Should those people have the 'right' to be remembered, falsely, as child abusers? Should anything and everything every written about the case be expunged? Should individuals be responsible for purging their diaries of such information too? Why not? Someone might upload it to the Internet in the future and, because everyone else officially 'forgot', who will remain to remember that this is officially prohibited information?

> The increasing "transientness" of information is, quite frankly, extremely scary

Information has always been transient, except that which we put great effort into preserving, until very recently. The idea that every bit of data, every photograph, every snippet of text should be immortalized and exhaustively searchable is only a few decades old has in no way been proven to be 'better'.

>…few decades old has in no way been proven to be 'better'.

As long as someone can leverage such information for any sort of 'gains', the incentives to store/collect information with these capabilities will persist and grow (esp as it becomes cheaper to do so).

It will be interesting to see in the future what kind of databases pop up that with information on those who seek to scrub themselves from sites. I know the project I was working had companies wanting to pay us to remove information we mined/crowd-sourced about people (which we declined on principle that we found that it was increasingly valuable to people to be able to leverage this information on whatever contextual basis they chose to view it through).

The Google's and Facebook's have had to comply since they ultimately take money from advertisers based in the EU (i.e. have assets with exposure to EU political risks that may entail when banking/employing workers in the EU when engaging with these sorts of actvities), future organizations/platforms (from relatively centralized to decentralized) that monetize their traffic/platforms by mining crypto on their users platform won't have to though.

Sorry but I really fundamentally disagree with this line of thought. My existence and my rights, right now, are vastly more important than some theoretical future information-hungry archeologist.

I’m sure any future historians working on a scale where these delistings would be relevant would be working with tools that would be able to do the equivalent of a content-aware fill on the missing data.

I.e., the tools will make up a plausible story, such as the story that best fits the available evidence excluding the forgotten bits? That's not very reassuring for those who worry about the loss of history.

I’m being slightly tongue-in-cheek, but what history can be researched or delivered in human-digestible form where the histories of the delisted at the scale you’re concerned about wouldn’t be so lossily compressed as to amount to roughly the same thing?

Not everyone will be delisted, the usual tools of extrapolation and demography are still available to the historian, and merely because information is not accessible via Google does not mean it is not available.

The highlight point is that Right To Be Forgotten is very specific on what types of information should be forgotten. (As shown, only 43% of requests for removal were approved.) If you consider the type of content that is required to be forgotten, this concern isn't really reasonable.

Surely you would have objection to posting your social security number here, and entering it into a never forgotten, permanent pool of information for us to reference and use, right?

RTBF specifically excludes any information that has historical significance or relevance to the public interest, so things like nude photos of you your ex posted is fair game, but the corruption scandal a politician is hoping to cover up is not.

As another commenter pointed out, history of the mundane (such as things RTBF permits removal of) is so voluminous in nature, that removal of some private citizens' data will not meaningfully reduce the historical value of the Internet (or what remains of it) in the future. I'm far more concerned about valuable sites and content shut down due to lack of finance or interest, than the removal of personal information that's harmful to people alive today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com