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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

Yes, this is always my argument against this sort of thing. Enforcing one person's right to be forgotten is infringing on someone else's right to remember.

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.

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It's not your right to dispense such justice--that in fact belongs to the state in a civilized society. I think this example proves the exact opposite of what you desire. Someone who has spent time in jail and had their record expunged 10 years later has been deemed by the state to have satisfied the burden of their offense, and, yes, their right to have their actions forgiven and forgotten should be at its zenith.

[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?]

This isn't about dispensing justice. This is about my personal right to own my experience of my life and those I interact with. Saying that my anger over having been abused by someone is no longer justified just because the courts have seen fit to expunge their records of the crime is deeply intrusive. The criminal court's job is to rectify the individual's relationship with the government. It does nothing to rectify the relationship between criminal and victim.

Part of the social contract does seem to dictate that the relationship between criminal and victim is governed by law. For example, if you were to respond to the attack by defending yourself in the moment, resulting in the assailant's death, you would potentially be free of any charges due to your right to defend yourself. However, if you were to wait a day (or, say, until after the assailant's release on what you perceived to be too short of a sentence) THEN assault that person, the law likely would be against you. You certainly have the right to continue to FEEL victimized, but query whether or not your right to act on those feelings after justice has been dispensed by the state isn't subject to the social contract with the state.

That is quite the stretch - no one is arguing that I have the right to beat up my attacker years later. That portion of our interaction is governed by laws.

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.

>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.

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.

Right, but wouldn't that contract be very strange if it only applied to crimes that I went to jail for? Wouldn't that create a perverse incentive to get arrested for something if you want the thing to be forgotten? Or are we forced to not talk about ANYTHING bad that happened more than x number of years ago? Wouldn't that create a strange world where we create this illusion that everything was perfect x+1 years ago?

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.

> Wouldn't that create a perverse incentive to get arrested for something if you want the thing to be forgotten?

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.

Yes, that situation would suck, but you can’t use the law to stop people reminding you of things you did. Not every bad situation can be fixed by laws, not without creating even worse problems.

> but you can’t use the law to stop people reminding you of things you did.

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?

Holding the grudge is helping no one, lest of all the victim. One could argue it's not an essential liberty, one we could dispense with for other gains in society. Maybe a better course of action for the victim is to have the traumatic memory zapped [1] and go back to normal life.

[1] http://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/

Look, I agree that it is not healthy to hold a grudge. My point is that I don't think it is our legal system's job to determine how long a grudge can be held.

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.

Your right to have an opinion of someone, speak facts freely and associate with who you wish are all fundamental rights which would be compromised by a "right to be forgotten."

I agree with those being fundamental rights. I wonder if a balance of rights can be found between those and the right to be forgotten - some way to preserve the individual agency of the victim and to give the offender a second chance.

It might be easier in the end to prohibit hiring discrimination based on criminal history same as its forbidden for other personal traits.

Giving people a second chance is not something that can mandated by law. Hell, the law doesn't even guarantee people a first chance.

This is a cultural shift, and it needs to be fought in the court of public opinion, not actual courts.

Where are you getting that serving your time in jail gives you the right to have your actions forgotten? Society 'forgives' you when you serve your full sentence, but there is nothing stated anywhere that your victims need to forget what you did once your sentence is up.

That's a fair point. The comment should have been more carefully phrased as aspirational. Recognizing that's not the current state of affairs, it does seem that not "forgetting" is akin to not "forgiving" in modern society. Consider trying to vote, let alone get a job after being released from prison if your name is plastered all over the internet in connection with a crime. That seems to be a second, extra-judicial sentence in fact if the law has in function "forgiven" you.

The OP article explains the concept of "expungement"

Yes - it is one thing to remove it from official records - it is a whole other thing to ask victims to not remember, or at least not bring up, what a person did.

If "bring up" means putting it online where everyone with a name and 20 seconds on google will find it, then there isn't really any point to removing something from official records.

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.

... and when the crimes are "victimless" i.e. fail to uphold basic criminal code principles requiring an actual particularizeable harm?

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.

US courts have not always agreed with that interpretation:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._Hearst_Corporation

Noted and agreed. See the comment below. The original response should have been phrased as aspirational. Clearly there's no right to be forgotten in the law today. However, query whether it's possible for the law to truly "forgive" a crime after a sentence is served without some efforts being taken to "forget".

I don't think the process of repentence+forgiveness can or should include things returning to a state as if nothing had happened. Scars will always remain and they are an important part of the human experience and help society remember and improve.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I can offer a third purpose for jail that I think is the most important: it keeps people who are likely to harm others from doing so.

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.

That downvote with no comment thing is because they are trying to practice THEIR right to be forgotten.

Of course you're still allowed to tell people what happened...

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.

Are you proposing that the rule should be "of course you're still allowed to tell people what happened, but only if you do so inefficiently and with little effect"?

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?

Why let people out of prison? What's the point of temporary incarceration without any form of rehabilitation?

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.

You can't force 'society' to change its opinion of former criminals via acts of law. The law can only govern a very limited scope of behavior, not peoples opinions or feelings.

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.

Rehabilitation is certainly in society's interests--I don't imagine there's any argument to be made against it.

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?

I wonder if this rule should apply to corporations. Should HN autokill comments calling Microsoft a convicted monopolist? They paid their fine, so all is good, right?

Or what about bad yelp reviews? If you exterminate the cockroaches, can you delete all the bad reviews?

Thank you for giving another example along that continuum. I admit that your example is in that gray area, and I have a hard time giving a definitive opinion on it.

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.

> The government doesn't get to decide how long I can hold that grudge.

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.

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