Europeans have a 'right to be forgotten' online. Should Canadians?
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
Recording everything forever is good in the same way that a total lack of privacy is good. Many things should be transparent, and they should be recorded. But there's room for nuance.
Unfortunately, right to be forgotten has a huge weak point: It relies on the party forgetting (often Google or Bing) to decide whether or not RTBF applies, rather than a neutral party such as a court. Criticisms of RTBF have largely surrounded examples where the decisionmaking was faulty, and unfortunately, the entities making the decisions would very much like the legislation to fail.
I would far rather RTBF requests be reviewed and approved or rejected by a government office, not a search engine company.
Wouldn't that mean politicians and their cronies can more easily scrub their own histories? Government holding the keys to approve/reject RTBF means it will be biased in favor of self-serving government-related RTBF requests
And the biggest part about these decisions being handled by government is that there would be accountability, records, and appeals, all of which you really don't have when a corporation is making the decision.
When tech merges with brains will they demand intrusion to delete what they don't want you to remember?
Yes, but only if it is possible to index/search/dump the contents of people's brains. In that case we are walking video cameras violating people's privacy everywhere we go, and it is only logical that we should mandate people get their brains wiped of privacy infringing information.
How would you like it if people sold information about you based on what they saw and heard you do in public? That is a gross violation of your privacy and illegal theft of your data. Wouldn't you want that person's brain to be wiped of information they have on you to protect your rights?
I wouldn't like it but I wouldn't want it to be illegal either.
You mean like PIs?
> That is a gross violation of your privacy and illegal theft of your data.
Most people don't like it, but it's certainly not illegal.
Yes, but they have a government-approved license to do so, normal citizens do not. Random civilians aren't allowed to just PI people.
In terms of privacy rights, it would be for the best if people had mandatory implants inserted at birth that automatically prevented brains from recording things about other people in public that haven't consented to your recording. I'm thinking something like White Christmas (Black Mirror) where the default is that strangers that haven't opted in are fuzzed out visually and audibly. This would be a huge win for privacy rights.
I mean, so do hair dressers. That doesn't stop people from cutting their friend's hair. You just can't charge for it.
> Random civilians aren't allowed to just PI people.
In the US, it is legal to video record anyone where they don't have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" (audio recording laws vary much more by State). At a minimum this includes everywhere most people would consider "in public".
> it would be for the best if people had mandatory implants inserted at birth that automatically prevented brains from recording things about other people in public that haven't consented to your recording.
There is really nothing I can add to your statement.
I currently believe very few people would agree with you, but I could be incorrect in that belief.
- cameras that observe your every move and sell off facial recognition and other data to third parties
- brain indexing/dumping tech that turns people into living cameras that are capable of doing the above.
Thus, if we decide that it is illegal to automatically collect information on people using computers, it shouldn't matter if the computer is electronic or biological in nature, it's a violation of the law either way. If companies aren't allowed to store PII about people without their consent, neither should indexable brains be able to store PII about people without their consent. It's quite simple.
Maybe I'm out of the loop, but do people really look at Black Mirror episodes and walk away thinking, "that might be a really good idea."?
Apparently at least one person did.
Yes, and the point of my commentary is that privacy zealotry itself has horrifying social consequences when taken to its logical conclusions
That sounds like a partial definition of journalism
This is actually not true in the US. So people should be careful and understand their rights.
In the US, the government affords us no expectation of privacy when we are in public. As soon as you step out of the hotel room you and your mistress went to at lunch, it's completely legal for a private investigator to snap photos or record video of you.
Basically, when you're out in public in the US, you have no right to privacy. So when people have amazon rings, or google glasses, or brain interfaces that record everything while they're in public, all that information is fair game for the authorities in any court action.
And, facial ID scanning at the door to ban repeat offenders.
For sex and swinger clubs this would be ideal. Keeps the privacy of the inside intact.
People are free to hide information or to take steps to obscure it, but I do not believe that anyone can own a fact.
Even if we were broadly in agreement that Right to Be Forgotten was a good idea, you still would not be able to own a fact. We sometimes create exceptions to people's right to share data and grant individuals/companies temporary monopolies over certain kinds of information -- the best example of this is IP law.
However, even someone who owns a copyright can't morally claim that they literally own the information. The state has given them a temporary monopoly in the interest of promoting public good, but there is no intrinsic moral right to IP that they can claim they have. Laws of this nature are a restriction of rights that we tolerate because of potential social benefits.
The system you are proposing goes far beyond the current Right to Be Forgotten.
> How would you like it if people sold information about you based on what they saw and heard you do in public?
People can already do that. They can go post on blogs or Twitter that they saw you do something. We already have a mechanism for indexing, searching, and dumping the contents of brains: fingers and a computer keyboard.
Right to Be Forgotten is controversial, but what you propose is much stricter. If Right to Be Forgotten tried to essentially make knowledge forbidden -- to make it illegal to write down your memories or post them online -- it wouldn't just be controversial; practically no one would support it.
It definitely is not a violation of your privacy and it is not illegal theft of data either.
That's kind of the ginormous loophole in the whole RTBF issue. If you can't compel anyone in the US or Asia to remove anything, then you're pretty much a$$ out.
This is acceptable/ignorable to little business across the world while giant corporations like Facebook or Google can't ignore it.
If it can't be found by anyone, isn't that about the same as deleting it?
And perhaps I want to make a list of sources where you can search for information about politicians to hold them accountable. If it's not censorship for them to be able to stop me from linking to true things they don't want people to see about them, then what is?
This is more about the right not to have everything you ever did tattooed on your forehead.
I should be able to talk about my experience with someone else in a public forum, even if that information is something that person doesn't want others to know.
Europe right to be forgotten only applies to publicly indexed searches, not the content - according to the top court
Nothing you said seems to be the reality that exists
So just bookmark a page and revisit it later, the tools have existed since the 90s
But in that case, wouldn't a news website that provides its archives of old crime stories for the public to read be guilty of that offence? If certain information is illegal to be disseminated, why isn't its actual source held liable or otherwise subject to takedown?
Imagine you meet someone on a dating site, and they assault you on your date. They serve their time, and now have a 'right to be forgotten'.
Do future potential dates not get to know that their date that night has been convicted of assault against someone else, also on a first date? Am I not allowed to warn those people?
Now, suppose he was never convicted. Am I allowed to write about my experience now?
The EU top court has been consistent that only de-referencing needs to occur
I am not saying I have the right to a personal diary, I am saying I should have the right to tell my story to whoever I want, and to share it however widely I want, and to help other people find what I have to say however I want.
According to the top court, the different service indexing all that stuff, within the EU, has to de-reference.
And forcing search engines to remove the content is certainly, in my opinion, infringing on my right to share my story.
The Internet is a public forum would do and say the same things in public you do online?
I previously asked[0] how EU would treat a convicted rapist such as (American) Brock Turner. The reply by commenter IAmEveryone says the law would prohibit the victim from writing about it. (If the scenario is not clear, a victim's blogpost is not a search index and yet it would still be prohibited.)
Since my April 2018 comment, that hypothetical scenario has been made more concrete when the victim later revealed herself as Chanel Miller on September 2019. She's been fervent in sharing her story (her book) in media outlets including websites.
I don't know of any reliable surveys but I'm guessing the majority of Europeans would favor prohibiting her from sharing her story (RTBF) to protect Brock Turner, but the majority of Americans would not.
(I'm sure there's a similar notorious crime & victim in Europe analogous to USA's Brock Turner but I don't have an example.)
It would only apply in case it was later found that rapist was framed and then exonerated. In such case he could claim right to be forgotten, to get all of old false articles removed. Of course people try to abuse this, just like everything else (like using american DMCA to kill videos, articles they don't like)
Chances are he would still be banging 12 year olds today and Bill Clinton would be smiling ear to ear. (JK obviously on that last one, but my below point will alleviate your suspicions.)
You may not like some speech, namely against you. I may not like certain speech either. But to establish this kind of legal precedent is foolish. What is next, prior restraint with regards to anyone mentioned in an article? I'm sure Big Daddy Donnie Trump would love that one lol.
Free speech is messy as fuck. Look at this "fake news" stuff for the past 3 years. Is it really fake? Debatable. Is it news? In most cases, yes.
Legitimate question I pose: Does free speech extend to deep fakes? (Finally those believing in the Clintons being child sacrificing cultists can be proven true!) This has the potential to get real messy real fast. Hopefully someone with a IEEE/DARPA-level big brain figures out a way to validate videos etc.
But if you write an article about someone, that contain outdated or false information, you can use right to be forgotten, to at least remove it from search indexes.
Article is still accessible, you can still link it, on HN or reddit or wikipedia, you just wont find it on google search results.
It's always been legal for a search engine or a website to unpublish or remove content. The only thing the right to be forgotten does is establish that a person has some form of ownership over content that's published about them, and the right to have it removed in some cases.
You don't get to arbitrarily decide that now everything on the internet has to be immutable and that no one should have the right to ever delete anything from their servers because "history," or that all personally identifiable information has to be preserved just in case the mobs want to doxx someone in the future.
Also:
>Real history started with the internet.
What does this even mean?
It doesn't matter what was the initial purpose of the internet. What matters is what it has become. The internet is a worldwide (and potentially interplanetary) interconnected public place. You can restrict information all you want but the reality is such that if something went public it's public forever. Every piece of information will be preserved somewhere in the network for as long as the internet exists. It's the reality we leave in.
> What does this even mean?
All of history before the internet is fuzzy. It was easily rewritten by anyone who controlled narrative and sources of information so the actual events or different view points are lost to the history. And as you dig farther into history the fuzzier it becomes. As I said above as long as the internet exists we can obtain different views on events and decide what is most likely happend, what was the reason it happend the way it did, etc. The internet gave us much more different sources of information to preserve history. That's why I said the real history begun with the mass adoption of the internet.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...
What is religiously sensitive material?
The reason such a law is required is often stated as "What if I, a changed person, am still haunted by something I did 20 years ago?" which to me seems more of a problem with our culture failing to adapt to new technologies. The world changed too rapidly and the culture is too emotion-driven these days, making 'right to be forgotten' laws seem necessary when the problem should, ideally, be solved by education.
I don't have the time right now to go into in depth about my thoughts, but I think there needs to be a distinction between 'right to be forgotten' as a cultural value and 'right to be forgotten' as law, the same way there's a distinction between 'freedom of speech' as a value ("I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it") and 'freedom of speech' as law as in the First Amendment. I'm not entirely sure where the line should be drawn, though, that is up for discussion.
My thoughts on the matter can be summed up as follows: Blocking some speech from your private website or publishing old racist tweets on your private website should fall in the same category (roughly) as eating an entire birthday cake: Something that shouldn't be illegal but something that should not be seen as good, people who do it should be made aware that what they're doing is not good but that it is their right to do so.
The recent controversy about Carson King (the viral Busch Light man) and his old racist tweets and the public reaction to all that come to mind as an example.
The problem is bound to the internet medium: how information is spread, indexed and stored, while being cheap - so cheap we can almost claim it's free.
It's not a matter of one being a changed person or not. It's simply your right to not have your information indexed, with no intrinsic value attached to it.
People wouldn't be featured on an old mass media like newspaper unless such person was "news-worthy" in the eyes of journalists that had to a code of conduct.
The internet has no morals or code of conduct.
'Swiss law requires us to archive business data for 10+ years. This means that we do not have the right to "forget" you.' [1]
It's unclear to me how Europeans have a right to be forgotten given the above.
If it is purely by domain, switch away from google.ca and use google.com to get the results you need.
If it uses geolocation of any kind, use a VPN that allows you to switch between endpoints, and use an endpoint in the States to bring up Canadian information.
In the end, this is nothing more than privacy theatre, in that these changes are only cosmetic and skin-deep.
Granted, I am of the firm opinion that all data is sacrosanct, and that the only thing that should be scrubbable from the Internet is misinformation that has been _proven_ to be demonstrably false by a court of law. Things like prior convictions should not be admissible unless you were later cleared of all charges and the convictions are clearly not in the public’s interest.
I don't think any information should be removed/removable from the internet, as long as there is demand for it. Users need to be a bit more savvy for expecting and identifying misinformation though.
Imagine a young person who gets wrapped up in some illegal activity. 30 years later settled down with a wife and kids he goes for a job interview and the person across the desk happens to have googled his name. That to me doesn't feel fair, people should have the ability to avoid their past haunting them forever.
Pre-internet the problem was naturally solved. The interviewer could have dug back through all of the local newspapers and happened upon an article but that's incredibly unlikely. Maybe if he was running for public office it might be uncovered.
The other side is that politicians and millionaires can use it to hide their dirty secrets. Nothing is perfect though so maybe that is the price we pay.
Either people are once a criminal, always a criminal and should be permanently extricated from society; or people have the ability to grow and deserve a second chance at a normal life.
I believe in the latter, as does the justice system that lets people go after their time is served (barring sex offender registries, at least). And I understand that yes, sometimes, we get it wrong and a person reoffends. Life is messy and sometimes unfair, but we have to strike a balance and take some risk sometimes.
I further believe that if a person is able to put their criminality behind them, the recidivism rate will drop. If you deny them gainful employment because Google decided a news article from 20 years ago is the most relevant thing about a person, which biases all future potential employers against recruiting him, then I believe they will have far less to lose and are more likely, right or wrong, to take upon them the mindset that, "if you're going to treat me like a criminal, then I am going to act like one!"
Yes, and I should have the ability to judge wether or not they've grown and changed, but I can't do that if I'm not even aware they committed crimes in the past.
> Life is messy and sometimes unfair, but we have to strike a balance and take some risk sometimes.
I don't think we should choose what risks someone else has to take. If someone has a rule 'I will never, ever, date anyone who has ever raped anyone', who are we to tell them, "Nope, sorry..... you don't get to have that rule for yourself.... we have decided for you"
Could you expound on these checks?
First tell me where you draw the line? Like X can be forgotten but not Y and I refer at regular people not persons with public interest.
I also feel that people don't get to pick and choose. If you want to be forgotten then everything should be forgotten, not just the stuff you don't like.