Cleveland.com’s ‘right to be forgotten’ removes names from some crime stories
imediaethics.org
imediaethics.org
Perhaps the biggest danger in this and other similar policies is not how it is applied today -- removing the names of people accused of minor crimes that have had their records expunged seems like a compassionate policy, given the effects it can have on things like employment prospects -- but in how it may be applied in the future.
The idea that a newspaper archive is a collection of living documents, capable of being amended, rather than fixed snapshots of the past, is a fundamental shift.
My concern is that down the line, more alterations will be permitted to be made, and potentially for less reasonable reasons, and then it's only a matter of time before archival information cannot be trusted, because there may be no way to determine what, if anything, has changed.
That didn't used to be the case. When print copies of newspapers were used for library archives, it was practically impossible to alter all extant hard copies.
But nowadays, unless this content gets indexed and preserved by numerous outside entities, it would be very easy for a newspaper to silently modify its own archives.
I would be more comfortable if the newspaper included, as part of its policy, a requirement that a versioning ledger be published along with any altered archival stories, such as:
* On 2018-10-19, this story was edited to remove the name of the suspect, under our "Right to Be Forgotten" policy. A copy of the original story is available for inspection at our office.
That, at least, would allow people perusing the archives to know whether a story had been altered long after publication, and it would give people who really need the information to acquire it (albeit not easily).
Blockchain to the rescue (for real this time, I think, I'm not an expert or a blockchain fanboy). A publicly ledger that anyone can verify hasn't been tampered with is the whole point.
It seems like the same concept would apply to storing hashes of any other document, such as a newspaper article.
In the past you could always do this research. But it was expensive so you wouldn’t just to check up on your new neighbor.
Where retroactively blocking a source URL (via robots.txt) causes archive.org to make its archival copies of/from that URL inaccessible. Supposedly, this is going to change. But it's obvious that lawyers will continue to explore and push the boundaries of this.
The Web ('Net) is not a library.
And datahoarders have a point, beyond just the stereotype of compulsive collecting. (I'm not one, but I'm increasingly regretting not having grabbed some resources while they were up.)
I am certainly not keen on archival systems or original stories being modified but search engine searches I can see being masked without too much issue. like a local no robots clause. the library/papers own search should not be affected.
Positive rights are more open to abuse, and better serve the centralization of power.
A right to be forgotten cannot be applied without infringing on someone else's right to speak about what must be forgotten, as in the case of forcing Google to delist something. A right to remember only infringes on the very dubious "right" to control someone else's speech and/or memory prosthetics, e.g search engines.
Overall, I agree on the surface with your positive/negative distinction but I'm not sure the world works this way in practice.
I do not agree. The very conceptualization of negative rights was in response to a feeling that the positive rights guaranteed by earlier liberal thought were insufficient to secure a just and free society.
It is far from obvious to me that there should be an expansive and universal right to be forgotten. But the position that there obviously should not be strikes me as ignorant to the changing balance of power between those two conceptions of the good.
No one asked for a right to be forgotten by erasing 30 year old newspaper coverage. And they ask for it now not because the list of things people wish were forgotten has changed; rather, it because technology has driven social change in terms of what forgetting occurs and what the consequences of that are. I think it naive that we would pre-assume the balance between those two rights would not change in light of that.
I also think it is possible to have a richer discussion about the issue if we do not immediately get bogged down in the contractualism that so often swamps out discussions about "rights".
I have no idea what the right answer is, but I think that the role of technology is really underappreciated.
On the one hand, people are probably correct to say that it's an infringement on their rights to not be able to talk about something that happened to them.
On the other hand, what it means to "talk about something" has changed radically. One hundred years ago, your reach would have been limited to the people in your social circle. If you were really determined to let people know what happened to you, you could take out an ad in the newspaper, but that would probably be seen as fairly weird if it was about something that happened years ago where the perpetrator has already been released from prison.
What about if the perpetrator decided to go live somewhere else, and the victim personally took it upon themselves to take out an ad in every city that the perpetrator moved to, telling everyone what happened. I daresay that person would be looked at as vindictive and possibly a little crazy.
The internet allows basically the last scenario, with very little effort on behalf of the victim, and none of the cost of publishing in a newspaper. It possibly even comes without the social cost of looking vindictive. Because it's so much easier to publish things online, no one considers the emotion that would be required to generate the post, as opposed to the strength of feeling required to get something published in a newspaper in a different city.
It seems to me that a discussion of rights without a discussion of technology will not accomplish much, as much as we'd like to believe that what is right is not dependent on something as arbitrary as the current level of tech.
Say, for example, I get beat up by someone. They are convicted and go to jail, but then in 10 years time they get their record expunged. Am I no longer allowed to tell people about what happened? I should be allowed to tell my story. I should be allowed to tell people what that guy did to me. If I want to write about it, I should be allowed to do that.
It is my right to decide how long I want to remember, and who I want to tell. If I don't want to forgive, and I want to tell people "This guy beat me up 10 years ago, I don't think you should have them around", that is my right, too.
The government doesn't get to decide how long I can hold that grudge.
To understand why some people argue for such a right, you need to appreciate that a report of your crime being the #1 Google hit for a search of your name is fundamentally different than some old acquaintances knowing something. You cannot escape the former, you can not make amends with an archive as you can with people, etc.
I know many people are reluctant to see a difference between situations when they exist on a continuum. And yes, there are scenarios every step of the way from "top Google hit" to "one guy knows and could tell if asked". What if you actively went around 20 years later telling the story? What if you kept commenting on every social media post of theirs?
But just because there's a gray area somewhere on this spectrum does not imply that we cannot recognise the extremes as distinct situations that require different rules.
What if the top hit is a personal website describing the crime and its effects, rather than a town newspaper--should Google knock that personal website off the front page?
Presumably, if society is willing to let people return it must gain from their return. That cost benefit trade-off is the exact same one that occurs with your website example.
However, the 1st amendment to the US Constitution puts strong limitations on the ability of the government to prevent or censor expression. How can the worthy goal of improving convicts' rehabilitation--albeit via suppressing news and opinion--possibly square with free speech?
Or what about bad yelp reviews? If you exterminate the cockroaches, can you delete all the bad reviews?
I agree our society does not treat ex-convicts well. But changing that requires a cultural shift, not a legal one. We should work on getting people to humanize ex-convicts, not legally trying to make them forget they are ex-convicts.
But, to reiterate the point: that does not proof that all such hypotheticals are undecidable.
Imagine someone stealing 1 cent. Should they go to prison? Of course not! Now imagine them stealing 100 million cents, i. e. $1 million. Should they go to prison? Of course!
Just because we're both going to have hard time saying which single cent of those 100 million made the difference between something to ignore and something to punish does in way mean theft should be legalised.
And yes, changes in efficiency do matter. That's why even the US does not recognize a right to privately build, own and operate nuclear weapons.
[Edit: Downvotes? How about a response then? What's the purpose of jail if (1) we know it's not rehabilitation and (2) the convicted's debt to society is not satisfied upon serving the sentence?]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._Hearst_Corporation
That said people wanting to be forgotten tend to just ask for search engines to ensure that their name will no longer be connected to certain pages rather than having the information removed entirely.
What then?
How about all the false arrests? False convictions?
People bludgeoned into pleaing guilty to avoid ridiculous overcharging and sham courts? What about them?
What happens when we fully implement chinese-style "social credit"? Thought-crimes?
Your media is already heavily manipulated. If you think it isn't, you're an idiot.
However, talking about facts that have occurred is ALWAYS my legal right. This has nothing to do with the crime the person committed, or the time served, or any other punishment. I am allowed to talk about events, and the legal process is entirely separate.
In fact, a simple example will make this clear. Imagine that 10 years ago, Joe did two things on a random monday - he beat up a guy, and he also stood someone up on a date.
By your reasoning, if Joe served time and was released, we would no longer be able to talk about his crime. We couldn't tell people, "Hey, that is Joe - ten years ago, he beat up Steve really bad. Served 3 years for it. Be careful around him."
What about the person he stood up on a date? Is she allowed to say, "Hey, that is Joe - ten years ago, he stood me up on a date. You should not go on a date with him" Is this also not allowed? Are we not allowed to talk about negative things people did more than X number of years ago? Or does it only apply to times you broke the law and were convicted, and served your time?
That seems REALLY strange. We are allowed to talk about things for as long as we want. As long as we aren't committing libel or slander, we have free speech to tell people how we feel about other people, and we are allowed to use examples going back as far as we want.
That is what freedom of speech is all about.
It's only your legal right because the social contract says that it is. You can imagine a social contract that says once someone has been to prison for a crime, it is in fact against the law to refer to that crime ever having occurred. This is not advocating that reality, just suggesting it's a possible to conceive of a justice system with that set of values.
The idea of the law saying we have to deny facts that are unpleasant to some people sounds like a distopia to me.
I mean, yes, we can imagine that reality. Many countries do this, and punish people for talking about events that occurred but were embarrassing for the country or specific people. They are not healthy societies.
I doubt it - if you were never convicted, you can probably sue the ones retelling the story for defamation.
> Or are we forced to not talk about ANYTHING bad that happened more than x number of years ago?
The whole 'right to be forgotten' thing is not even about forcing people not to talk about something. It's mostly about not having a mistake pop up as the first hit on google for the rest of someones life. You can talk about whatever you like, but you may not be allowed to publish whatever you want, if it would take away another persons chance at starting over.
> Wouldn't that create a strange world where we create this illusion that everything was perfect x+1 years ago?
No, and I have no idea why you would have that idea. Before internet search engines were a thing, few people would have the know-how, time, and motivation to look other people up in news archives. Did people believe that the past was perfect back then? Of course not! So why would that happen now?
> The idea of the law saying we have to deny facts that are unpleasant to some people sounds like a distopia to me.
But that's not what it is about! It's about not constantly bringing up old facts that have little relevance to the present so that people can improve their lives instead of getting in a downward spiral because of something bad in the past.
Suppose a long time ago you once farted very loudly (by accident!) in a very inappropriate setting, such as during a funeral, when everyone was silent. Someone catches that moment on video. They upload it online. They tag it 'cortesoft? more like corteloud! #fart', and somehow it ends up being one of the top hits when people google your name. At some point in the future you apply for a job, and another candidate is chosen because the company don't want to risk their new employee farting loudly during business meetings. So your career has taken a dent, to balance your budget you have to eat beans most days of the week...
Hey, it could happen. That funeral-fart is a fact, and therefor it must be published, in eternity! No matter that it was a one time thing, that you have been avoiding vegetables linked to flatulence for the past 15 years, and that you feel very sorry about it. To remove it from the internet is to create a dystopia. Any law that would permit people to take down such videos about them would lead to a strange world where the illusion is created that people didn't fart x+1 years ago.
Okay, perhaps the example is just slightly ridiculous. But the point is that just because something is technically a fact, doesn't mean that it's necessary worth repeating forever.
Why not? In public places people are generally free to go where they want, but stalking is still illegal (in most jurisdictions that I am aware of). Has outlawing stalking led to even worse problems? I don't believe it has. I don't believe giving people who are not public figures the right to not have their names associated with certain search results concerning things many years in the past is going to lead to "even worse problems" (which?).
Note that a 'right to be forgotten'-like judgment was made in the USA in 1931 in Melvin v. Reid, and I don't think it has led to "even worse problems". Perhaps you could be more specific about the problems you foresee?
It might be easier in the end to prohibit hiring discrimination based on criminal history same as its forbidden for other personal traits.
This is a cultural shift, and it needs to be fought in the court of public opinion, not actual courts.
How long you should be angry for and how long you can talk about it is between the person and their therapist, not the courts.
This idea is in concordance with the idea of rehabilitation (both separation and rehabilitation can happen at once), and it accommodates cases where the convicted is mentally ill.
No, they don't and they shouldn't. But for your own mental health, YOU should forgive it at some point. Holding grudges and never forgiving is not healthy for you. That doesn't mean you forget, but that it stops defining who you are.
Obviously, this is an extreme example, but the idea that "negative rights" are bad because they infringe on someone's "positive rights" makes no sense. You're ignoring the fact that the act of publishing information can cause harm to someone, and that we generally recognize that your rights do not include the right to harm others.
Also, your comment fails to recognize that Right To Be Forgotten is very clear on what can and should be forgotten, like false claims, which by news outlets "remembering" them, infringe on the individual being falsely accused.
Voting is (typically) a positive right - an entitlement, it’s guranteed to all citizens with no barrier to entry. Just existing as a citizen is enough (barring circumstances like felony conviction, though personally I’m against removing voting rights under any circumstance).
It was mentioned elsewhere how the right to freedom (and therefore freedom to kill) conflicts with the right to live. The right to freedom gets restricted in that case because that kind of restriction is the most minimal possible reduction of rights, which still allows everyone to maintain their rights. Life>freedom means a reduced right to freedom, and we don't want to do freedom>life as that results in a complete reduction of rights for an innocent individual.
So, rights aren't just absolute, they're a bit like the voronoi pattern created by intersecting circles. Privileges on the other hand don't even exist without other people usually. With cars, if one exists, you naturally have the right to get in one and drive it...until you're in a society with other cars. Then, it is difficult to exercise your right to drive a car without infringing on others, so much so that the right is entirely reduced and transformed into a privilege: you do not have the right to drive a car unless the state (societal structure) has confirmed you can do so safely.
American criminal justice is often a precursor for lasting biblical retribution. For example, sex offenders are often branded with scarlet letter for life even after having been incarcerated and released, presumably rehabilitated and having paid restitution to society. Criminal records are made public and posted to websites. disclosure is often required by law for prior felons.
Right now an accusation can ruin your life even if later corrected. It's not how society should function.
This article shows a Canadian perspective on how France and the US looked at the media during the DSK affair a while ago: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2011/05/20/dominique_st...
You can see how the different perspectives clash.
That said the system works pretty well because people generally don't bother looking up the full names.
As a result, it's perfectly rational to track those people and be wary of them.
The restitution angle is at least an argument, but treating the system as transactional in the sense that you break the balance by committing a crime then pay it back through slave work in jail is perhaps one of the few ways to make the system even more dysfunctional than it already is.
Depends on your definition of rehabilitate. From the Bureau of Prisons web site:
>We protect public safety by ensuring that federal offenders serve their sentences of imprisonment in facilities that are safe, humane, cost-efficient, and appropriately secure, and provide reentry programming to ensure their successful return to the community
>As a result, it's perfectly rational to track those people and be wary of them.
If you agree with the premise that jails are making criminals even worse, the more rational answer would be not to send them there to begin with, right? After all, if you put people in jail and release them, you are making society worse off.
It would be more rational to keep them in prison forever.
I think the most rational approach, though, is to fix the prison system and provide proper rehabilitation. Accepting that we incarcerate people, and release them in a way that makes the public unsafe, is a poor option.
>but treating the system as transactional in the sense that you break the balance by committing a crime then pay it back through slave work in jail is perhaps one of the few ways to make the system even more dysfunctional than it already is.
This is a strawman - no one here is suggesting slave work, or even any work, in jail as a measure of rehabilitation.
And Canada will not let you enter their country if you have a DUI in the US.
The surprise is that a first time offense is usually a misdemeanor in the US. In Canada the “misdemeanor” limit is .05%.
That seems reasonable. If the record is "expunged", you can legally say that you have not been convicted of that crime. So it can't legally be used against you (like on a job application)... so references to that crime should be removed from public view.
cleveland.com meant well and thought that this omission would help fix a problem they had, a high volume of blatantly racist postings in the largely unmoderated comments section of their paper in reaction to stories about crime. This solution did not work. It's as if racists aren't driven by sober and precise readings of the newspaper text, or something...
I do not possess any examples. The policy is described in a rather facile way here, however:
https://www.cleveland.com/readers/index.ssf/2014/07/the_comp...
Possibly the policy has changed recently, I don't read cleveland.com much anymore. (I don't think much of the author of that article or the paper's senior editorial staff, for a lot of mostly unrelated reasons)
> Many media outlets have a policy of not including race unless there are n (usually 5-7) other physical descriptors.
That sounds about right, I guess. In addition to skin color I'd expect an eyewitness with a decent view of a crime to describe - although not necessarily to recall correctly! - build, height, gender, hair color, and clothing. Some of the other common identifying factors (voice, eye color, gait, scars and tattoos, etc.) seem like they might be a bit of stretch.
Nowadays, I think the status quo for college newspapers is to not print names: https://www.poynter.org/news/college-papers-dropping-arreste...
The theory behind it is that the public shaming (particularly for public figures) from being named would be a punishment, and you shouldn't be punished for a crime without having been found guilty. There's been quite a few high profile abuse cases with this recently where rumours spread around around which 'high profile sportsman' it is.
These days with blogs and social media it usually just turns into a rumor mill, and someone outside NZ jurisdiction can name the person legally. It's also a pretty clear violation of free speech, and judges seem to be very willing to give name suppression, and sometimes maintain it in place even if there is a plea deal and the person is convicted - There's a solid argument that it results in abusers being back out in the public, without people even being warned. So it's not exactly my favourite bit of NZ law :)
Obviously this would require refinement. That said, someone could resurrect one of these records and reset the clock, but being derivative, the click would have to run much faster. Also it should not be automated (as that would subvert the while idea).
However, in practice this msy be unworkable without draconian enforcement.
Having worked with both voter privacy and medical records, my observation is that most proposals are more aspirational than practical. If you have any notions how to implement right to be forgotten, I'm all ears.
From the hip, I'd start with Translucent Database strategies, where individual records and fields are hashed & encrypted in place. Like a proper password vault. Throw away the encryption key and the data becomes inaccessible.
In contrast, I've advocated temporal privacy in the opposite direction. Enforced secrecy for a time period. Like with voting records and health metrics. Based on the notions that crypto has a shelf-life and after the fact auditability (transparency) is a public benefit. It'd be interesting if these two notions could be generalized.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/misunderstood-cri...
There's also the problem that stigmatisation helps more or less no one, because it's unlikely that parents can (or should) effectively supervise their children 24/7. And even if they did, it may protect their children at the cost of others, leaving the overall rate of these crimes unchanged.
To use an example with less emotional baggage: "Watch out for terrorists!" is a similarly useless warning.
"Recidivism rates for sex offenders are lower than for the general criminal population. For example, a Bureau of Justice Statistics study of 108,580 non-sex criminals released from prisons in 11 states in 1983 found that nearly 63 percent were rearrested for a non-sexual felony or serious misdemeanor within three years of their release from incarceration; 47 percent were reconvicted; and 41 percent were ultimately returned to prison or jail."[1]
Sorry, but it isn't enough for me.
That paragraph supports its own opposite conclusion, and actually makes me reconsider my opposition to sex offender registries.
You are telling me that the subset of the population that has been convicted of a sex crime once has a 1 in 7 chance of doing it again within just a few years, and a 1 in 4 chance within 15 years. And these are probably very conservative numbers - they are the rates for those who are actually caught and convicted again, which is a fraction of those who hurt others again (considered the oft-reported statistics that the vast majority most sex crimes go unreported).
What is the probability of committing a sex crime for adults who have never been convicted of any crime? I suspect it is hundreds of times lower than the rate for adult sex offenders.
EDIT: Wow, way to cherry pick you numbers. The very next paragraph is this:
> ...sex offenders had a total recidivism rate (for both sex crimes and nonsexual violent crimes) of approximately 36 percent over a period of five to six years...The 15-year recidivism rate is 13 percent for incest perpetrators, 24 percent for rapists, and 35 percent for child molesters of boy victims.
And further down:
> When recidivism rates for sex and nonsexual violent crimes were combined, 51 percent of untreated and 32 percent of treated subjects reoffended.
You are extremely dishonest for failing to include this additional data in your post.
> And where did the government come up with their numbers? As it turns out, the solicitor’s brief in McKune cited a government manual that in turn cited a single article published in 1986 in Psychology Today, a mass-market magazine aimed at a lay audience. It was there that Ellman found this sentence: “Most untreated sex offenders released from prison go on to commit more offenses—indeed, as many as 80 percent do.” The article did not even pretend to be a scientific study. It offered no hard data, and its author was neither a scientist nor a professor, but rather a man with a degree in counseling who ran a program for sex offenders in an Oregon prison.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc...
What is your definition of "sexual degenerate"? Because that particular turn of phrase is rarely a good sign, in my experience. If you'd just meant "pedophile" you'd have said "pedophile."
So what evidence do you have to challenge the criminal rehabilitation system in the USA?
This doesn't follow. We could just be locking them up for as long as we are allowed to to keep them away from society.
What the hell is "right to be forgotten". That isn't a right.
Media gets to be less and less reliable and less truthful.
If people want to be "forgotten", let them change their name/identity.
Imagine the chaos, not only on web sites, but across all of society.
Would schoolbooks have to be re-written? What would teachers say when children asked who the xth president of the republic was?
Sounds like a new badge of honor for minor "celebrities" and people who are self-important.
Are there codified specifications for "people of public interest?"