Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

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nonrandomstring

Some good points. I think a major problem is with the word "identity", is that there are always (at least two) meanings that may or may not intersect. We have self-regarding identities and other-regarding identities. The set of things we define about ourselves that includes beliefs, intentions, secrets and so on may be (for secrets must be) disjoint from the set of things others attribute to us, reputation, observed history, expectations and so on - though a mature, well integrated, social person could be expected to have a high intersection.

If we try to conflate those kinds of identity problems arise because people who are young, vulnerable, transient, in crisis need to be able to revise both kinds. Unless we are wanted criminals we have a right to be forgotten. And we all have a right to change our minds about things and re-invent ourselves.

I think we don't yet have a mature enough understanding of what identity really means for human beings to get successful digital mileage except in a few limited applications like payment systems or session management. Perhaps that's why the concept of "identity politics" is so prominently at play.

> right to be forgotten

1984 had a pretty good argument why it’s dystopian to tell people they are not allowed to remember or continue believing something.

I think the right to be forgotten applies to digital records, I might be missing the context here though.

Digital records are an extension of the mind.

Your liberty to extend your mind ends where my dignity begins.

no, it ends where my own mind begins.

the problem here is the "collective mind" aka the cloud of collectively constructed digital information

No they are not. They are a physical medium more akin to physical records than they are the mind.

This is such a ridiculous take it’s hard to take it seriously.

What about retention periods? About about paper copies? Should no data anywhere be regulated because it is somehow this nebulously and poorly defined “extension of the mind?”

> What about retention periods? About about paper copies? Should no data anywhere be regulated because it is somehow this nebulously and poorly defined “extension of the mind?”

and extremal counterpoint to this viewpoint is that all data be regulated because it's all digital and in the cloud.

just consider banning paper and pencils

> 1984 had a pretty good argument why it’s dystopian to tell people they are not allowed to remember or continue believing something.

Its a good book. It should also be tempered with a little Jane Austen, about the tyranny of unshakable reputation. My take is it's the "telling people what they are allowed to do" part that is dystopian. To that extent all laws are dystopian. However we do it all the time and obtain great wider benefit. For example, bad money choices might lead someone into insoluble debt, they declare bankruptcy, and seven years later that is deleted from public records so they can make a fresh start. In reality a "right to be forgotten" is more of a right to be forgiven. Asking that people forgive and discount past wrongs is not the same as poisoning and torturing them in a basement until their minds are wiped, as in some demonic MK-UTLTRA shitshow.

People can remember all they want… It’s the permanent digital record indexed by search engines, available at the tip of your fingers anywhere anytime - that is the problem.

I'd rephrase that it's the powerful agents dicating what them searchable indexes can find beyond what the algorithms doing the finding can do that's the real problem.

Add in the notion that the police and other important agencies can find a lot more than the Public can, because safety... and continue to completely break democracy while pretending you're doing all this for the greater good (where "for good" actually means "for concentration of power")

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