Google's Eric Schmidt suggests that young people should change their name upon reaching adulthood: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7951269/Young-...
Of course, a better way may be to introduce new right-to-be-forgotten laws like in the EU.
I do not know how this particularly works in the USA, but in most reasonable countries I know of, the ways in which anyone (company/government/etc) can interact with anyone who isn't a legal adult are limited. For good reasons too, I believe. I think it even is dictated by signed/ratified international treaties/declarations, but I don't recall any details right now.
I'm pretty sure that the tracking of minors (or the unborn), essentially surveillance, is actually in violation of the legal protections those are supposed to have. I've heard plenty people argue that this tracking is somehow admissible, if their legal guardians sign off on it. Often based on the assertion that legal guardians are responsible for those under their care. However, the legal protects of minors are a thing on their own. As far as I know, guardians can not "give away" the legal protection of minors. No more than any person can "give away" their inalienable human rights (also not by consent), which is what makes them inalienable.
So here we have an industry that in all likelihood is seriously violating the legal protections that minors (and arguably unborn too) are supposed to have. Instead of demanding that governments address these rogue corporations, which considering the systematic nature of their violations probably even warrant to be classified as criminal organizations, we instead listen to what key people in this industry say in an attempt to justify their actions, or suggest as remedy for their behavior.
I'm not really all that shocked about people like Schmidt saying such things. About as predictable as a politician talking any kind of bullshit that will sell their agenda. However, I am appalled that this industry gets away with what it currently does. To me, that says a hell of a lot about the system, and how it apparently prefers to protects these interests instead of protecting the people it legally is supposed to protect.
This also happens to adequately describe how it feels to live in Brooklyn, NY these days...
The problem is not individual bad people or bad companies. Take out the ones that exist now and a sea of new adtech startups will take their place.
Can you not imagine a scenario where we didn’t leave everything in the hands of a completely unregulated market?
We have (kinda) world wide copyright laws. We have world wide drug laws. We have world wide sea and war laws. Why don't we have world wide privacy laws?
... which get flouted all the time
> We have world wide drug laws.
... And the war on drugs has been a huge success.
> Why don't we have world wide privacy laws?
The Internet makes trying to enforce world wide privacy laws much harder than physical laws: anyone in the world can reach you and collect data about you.
> Just make it outright illegal and fine heavily per violation. You have profile information that a user didn't explicitly give you? $10k fine, each.
How do you propose to discover violations? Self-reporting won't ever happen. If you then propose to give draconian sanctions to trying to cover up such issues, congratulations, you've killed the ability of people to build anything and share it with the world.
Not really. European Union services are more regulated towards user rights (GDPR) and services from other big countries are usually targeted towards domestic or regional market (typically East-Asian apps for example).
Is robbing ok, because if you don't do it, someone else might?
This is akin to saying: if you desire privacy, you can just clear your cookies.
There will always be a way to find these "name reset" folks - the privacy policies if services will have sentences like "to combat fraud..." "to protect the service..."
This will seem reasonable because one person desiring privacy shouldn't be able to skip out on a utility bill!
Without regulation - strong regulation - this won't change anything. Unfortunately it seems like anti-business regulation rarely works - if bills progress, they are defanged at the last minute.
The reason the EU has these laws is they remember people being put to death, even with minimal data collected in the pen-and-paper era.
Even though the US had pearl harbor, they haven't had their data pearl harbor moment.
I worry that we might have passed a "point of no dissent", where groups and even individuals in favor of privacy regulation can be surgically removed from dissent.
No problem, you just need simultaneously to change your name, your address, your bank account and credit card, your friends, your hobbies, and your biometric properties. Of course, also buy a new computer with different hardware, and install different applications.
Then hope you didn't forget anything, otherwise you need to do the whole thing again.
Won't work for: Google/Facebook tracking you across the web, probably not even 10 years ago when this article was published. You're still the same person.
I'm more interested in how decentralized platforms might impact the current trend of verified accounts and use of real names. I can see a couple potential outcomes with decentralized platforms:
1) The use of pseudonyms grows further and speech gets even more divisive as people can speak without it coming back tarnish their real-life identity.
2) The use of real names grows more popular as people want to own their speech without fear of being de-platformed.
In combination with flipping Data Ownership laws to where a person owns the data about then, and Right to Know laws where companies are required to (on request) give you all the info they have about you, and allow you to correct that information. Basically expanding on the Credit Rating agencies laws where (in the US) you are entitled to a free credit report and the ability to dispute info.
I never gave it particular thought so maybe I’m in the tiny minority though.
A child born since Facebook's inception will be approaching 18 soon, and might have had parents who posted the child's entire life on Facebook from the ultrasound all the way to (maybe?) high school graduation.
When that child turns 18 and the child does not consent to tracking, what happens to all those photos, behavior, and YouTube videos that kid has watched? Maybe the kid starts as a clean slate since they've reached an age of majority, but how can you technically even keep track of that?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/09/16/18...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/facebook-fin...
Search for: "child suing parents over facebook photos" and you'll find plenty more.
Seems a little "too late" to retroactively remove consent some years later. That being said, I can see arguments either way that make sense. :/
And the parents do consent when the photos are taken.
Lets take a run at this one. I did specifically mention a couple exemptions above, which include expectation of privacy - a crowd in a public space don't have an expectation of privacy.
(In the US this goes further, where you can photograph anyone in public, with or without their consent, so long as it is within the nebulous "community standards" - but the US is not the norm.)
However, that's not the case for a wide variety of other photographs.
For example under the Australian Privacy Act:
> Images of individuals in photographs or video (images) are treated as personal information under the Privacy Act 1988 (Privacy Act) where the person’s identity is clear or can reasonably be worked out from that image. [0]
Similarly, in the EU, photographs or video of someone who can be reasonably identified within that work, is to be treated as Personally Identifiable Information under the GDPR, and thus requires consent. GDPR also requires you notify anyone in a public space ahead of time that you may be filming or photographing in the area.
I think it's fair to say that it is _not_ normal in most of the world to require no consent if you're not doing something commercial. Consent is the norm.
[0] https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/guidance-and-advice/posting-...
The GDPR doesn't directly include photographs as protected information, unless the are attached or connected to other info.
And it's worth noting that this is not about collection of data but use of data - if the legal basis of the processing was consent (perhaps there was a different legal basis, then consent isn't relevant) then withdrawing the consent does not make the earlier processing illegal, but it does require the controller to stop processing (using) the data they collected while they had consent and ensure that any processors to whom they delegated data processing do so as well.
Additionally, the child will usually not know every site their parent has consented to tracking use.
Your right to be forgotten does not out weigh my right to remember and share what I remember with others.
You have no right to tell me that I can't tell someone else I was in a hacker news conversation with Flowerlad on HN in January 2021 where he wrote "....whatever you wrote...." and that includes writing an article on my blog, tweeting about it, publishing it in the NYTimes, etc... and the idea that some law would prevent a search engine from indexing my content because your name happens to be in it seem wrong to me. You'd have effectively de-platformed me to talk about you or even my own memories.
You are correct that right to be forgotten does not outweigh you right to remember and share what you remember with others. The law does not restrict this right - GDPR, including that clause, does not apply to private persons personal activity.
However, that right is more narrow than you imply. First, you personally have the right to share your memories with others, but companies and businesses do not have such a right. Second, you do not have a right to have your content indexed by a search engine - your right to talk about these things in everyday outweighs the other persons right to privacy, but their right to privacy outweighs your privilege to publish your memories in mass media. Yes, you would be effectively deplatformed, but that does not violate your right to speak about this - the right to privacy is a fundamental human right, the right to a platform is not; any rights to free speech does not include a right to be widely disseminated.
no it is not.