Ya, stuff like that is why we need a right to be forgotten in the US. People tend to see an arrest and leap to conclusions.
I say this as a person who has never been arrested. :/
I say this as a person who has never been arrested. :/
You assume I'm happy about the arrest rates, I'm not. However, I don't have any real ability to change them besides not voting for "tough on crime" politicians. I already do that for all the good it does.
The fact you never shower is not going to get you arrested.
> Anything that might make someone unemployable that didn't result in a conviction or other defeat in court.
> The topic is arrests. The fact you never shower is not going to get you arrested.
I guess to me the pattern was obvious but I accept it wasn't obvious to you. Yes, the topic is related to arrests & court cases.
I'm not sure how I can be any clearer. If it isn't directly related to arrests by a single degree, it isn't on topic imo.
- If a local paper published the home address of a woman who was a private citizen in their paper, every single day, and her crazy ex-husband used that information to locate her and kill her, the newspaper would be liable. But the Internet does that all of the time and claims that it's free speech.
- If a person is convicted of a crime, does 10 years in prison, and serves their debt to society, that's still public record. An employer can find it even without doing a Google search, although that's what people are claiming is a 'grey area'. Is it 'fair' that the person's name immediately turns up their arrest record as the #1 result? Well, 'fair' and having done 10 years in prison don't really add up.
Here's the thing - in the U.S., people are up in arms over the 'right to be forgotten' and claiming it violates free speech. But that's not really true. Today, if there is inaccurate information about you - like, say, Google links to a website that says you were busted smoking crack in a nearby schoolyard, but it is completely untrue - you can go after the offending site and they will have to remove it under U.S. laws, and that means Google's links will evaporate. But this isn't the case in the E.U., where this law was passed.
In the US, libel and slander laws can't be used to prevent people from saying things which they can prove to be true or factual.
In the traditional (pre-automation) era intent played a large role. This worked out okay in most cases, because harmful things (like Horsley's site) tended to only show up as a result of malevolent intent. Sites with lists of abortion doctors' home addresses didn't just show up innocently, so if nobody had malevolent intent, they wouldn't show up. Now if algorithms are just throwing up lots of things, there is probably not malevolent intent on the part of the algorithms, but the same harms can result. So different legal systems are trying to figure out what to do about it.
It's the same thing with the move from manned helicopters => unmanned drones for local law enforcement. Unmanned drones significantly lower the upper bound on what local law enforcement can do with air surveillance. Society didn't care too much about reining in local law enforcement on these issues in the past because it was too costly (to law enforcement) to be a problem to society at large.
The big difference between now and the pre-Google days was that there were some checks and balances on the public record. Yes, I could find out that someone had been arrested, convicted, served their time, and was released...but it took some effort. I had to actually go down to where the records were kept, and actually go through filing cabinets or microfiche to find the relevant record.
For some kinds of public records, I could write to a government office, and they would send back copies of the relevant records, so I at least did not have to actually go to the record office, but this was slower and would often have fees.
This also presumes I know who has the relevant record. I could potentially have to go on a record fishing expedition in every state the person might have spent time in. There were firms that would do these searches for me, but they did not do it for free.
In this environment, we had balance. The public record was public, but an employer or a nosy neighbor was not going to go to the trouble of finding your records unless they had a really good reason. For most jobs, it was not worth it for the employer to bother.
Furthermore, records could be sealed or expunged, and that actually worked. Now, there are widespread copies of everything, so once something is out there, it stays out there.
Also to clarify the two points you've mentioned
Google does not generate the data. The data has to be public somewhere. If google is not doing the indexing, some other search engine is doing it. Even if the search engines did not exist, a motivated stalker will still find the public address.
> Is it 'fair' that the person's name immediately turns up their arrest record as the #1 result? Well, 'fair' and having done 10 years in prison don't really add up.
If it is not fair, the data should not be public. It is the law enforcement's fault to make such information public.
There is another argument that can be made here as well. What if the person who went to Jail was a significant person ? Should he have the right to ask a historian to ignore his past crimes when a biography is being written ?
I originally said this was a grey area because there will be cases where this is a good reason and there will be cases when this is a terrible idea. However asking the search engines to ignore public data is most definitely treating the symptoms instead of looking at the broader problem.
I don't see why someone's arrest record should be hidden unless they were exonerated or there were specific circumstances for doing so.
We're not asking search engines to ignore public data. The EU is telling search engines to ignore incorrect/defamatory data because the EU doesn't have the protection laws that the U.S. has.
The problem you aren't getting is that for the poor and anyone who can't afford a lawyer...this doesn't happen. The exceptions are notable nationwide media coverage types.
I never said anything remotely related to whether it was administered correctly or not, or how effective it was in any way.
Noted.
If you aren't able to get the person in a court of law and win, you shouldn't be able to prejudice their ability to make a living.
EU excludes public figures [I'm not sure exactly how its written].
It isn't like people are magically going to forget nationwide media coverage of someone like Nixon and his "I am not a crook speech". We still remember it decades later. I think I'd rather err on the side of protecting the poor and weakest members of society that probably can't get someone to take a libel case on their behalf for $$ than punish every guilty person "who got away with it".
For every Nixon, there are dozens if not hundreds of people with arrest records published on the internet that never went to trial.
[1]: Before correcting that, do think about whether it is an option to society, and I am specifically referring to the US. Various religions do some work here, but we do not as a society wish to use that mechanism.
Historically, we've seen more tolerant and open societies win out economically over more closed and judgmental ones. Countries that allow women into the workforce do a lot better than ones where work is a man's province, because they have twice as many potential workers. Countries that place people into jobs based on talents and interests do better than those that have rigid caste systems or exams, because they can adapt more flexibly to changing skill requirements. The mechanism is just like the one above: if you deny someone a job for an arbitrary, irrelevant reason, he'll just go find someone less arbitrary (or arbitrary in different ways) and work for her.
However, if someone finds themselves unable to get a job in their local area [e.g. Small Town USA where you might only have 1 employer of a given type in some cases] and is forced to move to find a more tolerant employer...that is a burden we shouldn't reasonably expect people to suffer due to a cautious police officer who wanted to play it safe and arrest someone.
Further second-order effects become interesting, too... for instance, this could be a long-term threat to the entire social network scene. If it simply becomes a place to play a persona, and correspondingly a place to consume other people's personas, rather than connect with people on a human level, it also becomes something much less compelling than it currently is.
I think we also have to consider that job applications aren't absolute, they're relative in many ways. If having drunken orgy pictures up on my Facebook isn't a disqualifying event for a job, I still have to consider that I'm going up against someone who doesn't, and that the other prospect may thus be more attractive (because, let's be honest, there is real information about personality in those pictures however much we may wish it was otherwise). So next time I apply, I purge my pictures and now I'm the guy with the squeaky clean social media presence, which pushes everybody that much further in that direction.
Openness and non-judgmental is fun to say, but hiring is fundamentally, irreducibly judgmental. A judgment is what it is. That has an effect on the process.
I'm just musing... I'm serious about my first paragraph, I think it's too early to call the second-order effects.
For arrests w/o conviction, the person has done nothing that would justify a violation of his privacy - what right or excuse could there be to allow the police to publish their names or other personally identifiable info in the first place? Especially for minors (as for the curfew issues)?
You need to keep the private info private, that's it.
It certainly doesn't prevent a law that forbids police to disclose names of arrested minors, and keep their names out of the public record unless they're proven guilty.
Alot of these kids never have it published that they were acquitted anywhere notable. :/
Then yes, I guess I am.