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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

The “right to be forgotten” is an explicit right in the EU, which I think applies here.

I'm not saying that this right is a bad thing, but the reality is that it's rarely enforceable. As soon as you put something on the internet, you have every "right" to expect that it's there forever.

No amount of legislation can outweigh the technical reality.

The government has no problem getting rid of CSAM and terrorist material, for practical purposes. It's not a technical problem.

They only get rid of those materials that they can seize. I doubt they will be able to seize a properly hosted onion domain. It's just that most of the actors aren't good enough with technology.

That's the reason you mostly see the pretty dumb guys getting caught. As long as you are smarter and more tech-savvy than 80% of the criminals, you are pretty much out of reach for the feds.

It is obviously a technical challenge. Image yourself trying to facing 3 pictures, one of CSAM, another of terrorist material and just some random photo of random guy eating ice scream: what steps would you do to determine if this last photo is "legal" or not?

YouTube have decades of attempt at determining if uploaded content violates copyright, normally through fingerprinting content submitted by right holders. YouTube still fails at catching all copyright infringement. That's why they are generally protected from prosecution while they demonstrate reasonable attempt that preventing their services from being misused.

Imagine ALL IMAGES IN THE WORLD being submitted for fingerprinting. How about malicious or erroneous submitions that taint datasets?

Also: right to be forgotten is a horrible misleading name. At most you have right to request data to be removed from datasets. And only if you have some legal basis that demonstrate that your data is in that dataset. It is not a right to be "forgotten". Imagine you yourself being told to "forget an image, sound, etc", how is this enforced? You may even ask for proof that you know the content you are being told to forget. How do you do this?

If you have the image and the person reaches out saying it’s them and they want it removed, you have a pretty good idea of the legality. As stated, this isn’t a technical problem it’s a bureaucratic one. Most companies didn’t think they had to remove it so didn’t have steps in place to do so. Now a lot of them do, with GenAI just being the latest group of companies who feel they have an argument in favor of not having to do so.

The “right to be forgotten” works nicely in tandem with the “right to know” - where you get to ask companies to tell you what they have on you.

The government has enormous trouble getting rid of CSAM. The FBI had databases of content that is decades old - basically images recognised as "classics" that are still shared amongst the consumers of such things.

It is illegal to possess, but despite the most aggressive enforcement on the planet it is still out there.

In case of CSAM, the trouble is in how to identify who have a copy of it.

In case of personal data in this article, they have already identify which legal entity have it.

> One artist even found that her private medical records containing photos of her facial condition were in LAION, a foundational dataset for many GenAI products.

From the article I'm extremely skeptical people have actually identified anything, since LAION does not store content. LAION is a list of links to content hosted by others, publicly.

> As soon as you put something on the internet, you have every "right" to expect that it's there forever.

Maybe realistically any uploaded content can be found somewhere on the internet forever (I doubt that, tbh), but this doesn't mean we should throw our hands up and say "it's impossible to regulate".

We already have precedent for this in the form of copyright/DMCA takedown requests. The MPA/RIAA has a legal avenue to protect their content, why should it be any different for individuals?

Americans are not bound by EU laws. We appreciate forcing iPhone to USB-C, but you can keep the rest of your authoritarian laws.

EU rights do not apply in the US.

The 'right to be forgotten' isn't a right.

True but globally operating corps are subjects to all kind of national laws and as soon as you have any presence in the EU those regulations apply.

An online shop in Germany once removed Cuban cigars because of US trade sanctions.

ClearView just declared to ignore the right to be forgotten, even for EU citizens. It will be interesting to se how this plays out. I guess it will take a few years…

No one is implying that. But companies have to comply with laws in jurisdictions where they operate. OpenAI and other generative AI companies certainly operate in the EU.

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