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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

I know the EFF opposes the right to be forgotten. I'm curious if there are any similar concerns with the GDPR.

The trouble with the right to be forgotten in censorship. The concept is nice, but in the end, the right to be forgotten can mean corrupt powerful people can censor their misdeeds.

I think something similar in the US would be problematic without our freedom of speech. Even if you get a criminal record expunged, anyone who scooped up that data, that was once public, does have the right to hold onto and sell it.

Not to say that's a good thing. It does encourage Labeling Theory, preventing people with criminal records from being able to find legit work (a counter example, the sex offenders registry in Australia is confidential. It can only be accesses for very specific things, like employment at a school).

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> The trouble with the right to be forgotten in censorship. The concept is nice, but in the end, the right to be forgotten can mean corrupt powerful people can censor their misdeeds.

That would actually most likely not go through. As a powerful person, you're likely considered a person of public interest, at which point your right to be forgotten is forfeited, because it conflicts with free speech. (A judge will decide whether that's actually the case or not.)

I hope we can differentiate "I want the New York Times to remove an article about me" from "I want Equifax to remove its business records about me because I don't consent to them collecting my data for commercial purposes."

The former would clearly run into 1st Amendment concerns, but I'm hopeful the latter can be allowed without the same concerns. Does the EFF oppose the latter type?

The foundation of the American economy is the fact that the financial industry, and not you, owns the records about your credit history. Disempowering data subjects is essential to making credit history a useful signal about risk. Without that signal, lending would disappear overnight. This would crash home prices and wipe out almost all middle-class wealth. It would also probably eliminate the auto industry and severely curtail retail as consumer credit disappears. A less indebted society might be good in the long term, but that’s one hell of a shock you’re proposing.

You're right about the way these things currently work. But you'll still be able to volunteer information about yourself in pursuit of a loan. Exactly who will validate that information is another question. (Dare I suggest a distributed credit ledger? :) )

There are quite a few startups in the lending space. But most I've encountered rely pretty heavily on existing, underlying infrastructure, i.e. legacy finance.

A Blockchain is much worse than a credit reporting agency. Instead of one entity having your records, everyone does!

Yes. Storing financial records themselves on the blockchain would be pure insanity.

But I’m imagining a distributed reputation rating scheme. There’d have to be some PageRank-analogous feature (I think that’s how PageRank works), so that a high rating from an entity with a high rating is worth more.

Still plenty of issues to remedy... spam, sock puppets, etc. But I’d bet that a distributed credit rating system could be built.

Just eliminate the various liability shields that have been enacted for third-party content. In certain areas (e.g. the personals website crackdown) we are moving in this direction already.

If you make a search engine vulnerable to a libel lawsuit because, for example, their search results make it look like Joe So-and-So was arrested for DUI (when it was actually Joe So-and-Sew or some such thing), they'll just stop indexing that stuff entirely.

Best to avoid creating new laws where old legal concepts will work fine.

Is that really the world we want, though? If Google is liable for third-party defamation, aren't they likely to deindex any negative news about anyone who threatens to sue them?

If it's about a public figure (even a limited-purpose public figure), there's no problem because that speech is already highly protected against libel claims.

If it's basically just non-newsworthy information about private citizens, then I do not think they should be shielded from liability.

GDPR focuses too much on "the right to be forgotten" but is a threat to something more important: "the right to not be deleted".

Can you clarify what you mean?

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