5 ms·

I know it's still quite a controversial topic, and I have not yet come down on whether or not I like the current implementations, but I am a fan of the notion o

I know it's still quite a controversial topic, and I have not yet come down on whether or not I like the current implementations, but I am a fan of the notion of a Right to be Forgotten. At the very least, I like the notion that a person should be able to have some level of control over what companies are allowed to access about them; the control over what information may be in the public sphere is a little more difficult to talk about. E.g., I deeply dislike that most companies operate on an opt-out system for information collection; I would rather information collection (particularly anything dealing with personally-identifying information) to be universally opt-in with some reasonable attempt (not an EULA) made to offer the user an informed decision. Search-engines are tricky because they provide a public service for finding information but are, themselves, a company that often profits from the collection of information both in the usership of their service and in the data they crawl to aid their users in finding content. My current opinion (which is not yet fully formed) is that it is wrong to order Google to unlist results; but, on the other hand, it should be completely legal to order Google to remove what is essentially a dossier that they have on a particular user (at that user's request). I am still mulling this whole thing over; but, at the very least, it is obvious that the issue isn't a simple one.

bko 11y ago
I don't see how anything like right to be forgotten can be implemented without essentially internet censorship. Does a corrupt politician have a right to be forgotten forgotten? Former politician? Bank executive? Hedge fund manager? Barbara Streisand? How about those who donate to political causes? The trend seems to be going the other way on that one, at least in the US. What is the criteria and who decides? I can't imagine how such subjectivity would not be abused.
- Zikes 11y ago
  I believe there should be a framework in place, but that it should be strict yet accessible. An easy example is someone that is arrested but not convicted of a crime. Arrests are public information, and very often people assume that only the guilty are arrested. Combine that with the regular practice of Googling new hires for every job and someone's life could easily be quite literally ruined.
  - runako 11y ago
    If a community cares about this, it seems more appropriate to address this at the community level by not publishing arrest records. Far fewer thorny issues are at stake with that decision that there are in censoring data that has been public at some point.
    - ghaff 11y ago
      Collectively, we've never really seriously dealt with information that was historically public but which historically also took considerable effort/interest to access--e.g. it was in a dusty file cabinet in the office of some town clerk who only worked for a few hours on Tuesday and Thursday. Furthermore, it took even more effort/interest/even money to link together such information with other information sources. While there are, in general, a lot of good reasons for transparency in society, there are probably good arguments for keeping certain types of information private now that they're so much easier to access.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    One person's guilty looking circumstances are another person's innocent daily routine. Does the picture of the devout Jew carrying a ham qualify?
  - bko 11y ago
    Criminal or civil? Should we scrub the internet of OJ Simpson? What about when a trial is taking place, can reporters report on it and then have to purge it from their servers immediately after acquittal? I just don't think it's practical. Even if you believe there is some theoretical framework that would not put undue hardships on all to comply and only be applicable to those causes in which we overwhelmingly agree upon, this isn't the framework that will be applied. The fact is I won't be involved in designing this framework and (presumably) neither will you. In fact, I will likely never even understand the framework. The people who will be involved will be the people with the most at stake and the most amount of money. They will know how the framework works and will be integral in designing it to benefit those same people. Classic regulatory capture. Intentions are not results.
- fizzbatter 11y ago
  Completely agree. Furthermore, those who seek power will always keep the records - whether it's a black market search engine or various governments, these rights to be forgotten will not fully be forgotten, so what is the ultimate point? As an interesting aside, http://morph.is http://morph.is is hoping to implement Distributed Search, effectively nullifying arguments like this. Which, in my opinion, is for the best.
  - ximeng 11y ago
    morph.is looks like it goes a little beyond Distributed Search: "When the World Brain is capable of honestly deciding, it may then rule upon my compensation from the Fund from that point and beyond. I will turn over complete control of the Fund to the World Brain once it is legally or de facto capable of asserting such control."
    - fizzbatter 11y ago
      Oh i completely agree, i just meant it is attempting to do that - i didn't mean just that :) (the other project goals seemed less on-topic, so i didn't bring them up)
- goldfeld 11y ago
  This is about webpage searches, there's still all of social media for spreading word about public service information. Whereas, if a person is wrongly charged with a crime, should they not at least have a right to not show up in web page searches? No one on social media will want to spread the old, wrong news. So the good the Right to be Forgotten does has no substitute, while what it takes away can be picked up by social media (and search within social media too). That said, I still haven't made up my mind about it.
  - belovedeagle 11y ago
    > No one on social media will want to spread the old, wrong news. You can't be serious. This is exactly what happens all the time with internet hate mobs.
    - goldfeld 11y ago
      It's a growing problem, yes, but I see it as a different problem. Social media is by definition people. It's a culture/education problem, because people would spread it on messaging apps (like whatsapp) or even mouth to mouth, so there's seemingly no technological solution to that. It's also easier to discredit information based on who's spreading it. Meanwhile Google is taken as authority on what's relevant. So actually there is something to do with tech we could do: transparent trust chains where you know where information is coming from out of your trusted peers and which trusted peers of theirs. It's very hairy, because trustworthiness in one subject doesn't carry over well in many cases, but maybe machine learning will help us there. That would be a nicer scenario than everyone trusting what Google says should be the most important public things to know about a given person. Even politicians suffer from misinformation spread by opposition, so it's not clear cut even in that case.
  - bko 11y ago
    You assume that the legal system is infallible. I don't think it should purged from the public record or search engines. This whole thing reminds me of 1984, where the government alters events in the past by essentially controlling information. I don't like that people are wrongly charged with a crime either. I think as more information about people becomes made available, our culture will shift to become more permissive as to appropriate behavior. As the sexual revolution brought about attitudes towards personal relationships, I think eventually society will be more forgiving with the information available online about a person.
- notahacker 11y ago
  Unlike former politicians and Barbara Streisland, the people this legislation is designed to help have nothing on the internet about them save for a reference to something embarrassing (often without less-newsworthy context which later exonerates them of the charge/accusation). A search on even the worst of corrupt politicians usually surfaces information on their achievements as well as their failings, and probably highlights a notionally "NPOV" article and their own homepage as the top results. And of course, corrupt politicians, being public figures, end up Streisand-ing themselves if they attempt to abuse the legislation to hide particular articles about their past. As for the actual legislation: there's an opt out for media companies (Google chose not to try to identify as a media company), a public interest defence, and the local "information commissioner" that Google can refer the case to if it doesn't want the cost and risk associated with making its own "right of removal" vs "public interest" evaluations.
fmorel 11y ago
I would prefer that society realize people make mistakes and/or change, and allow others a second chance. Then we wouldn't need the right to be forgotten.
- caskance 11y ago
  As long as the "right to be forgotten" exists, that will never happen.
jostmey 11y ago
"Right to be forgotten" is the wrong kind of control to give to people over their private information. I can understand why people may not want to be tracked over the internet, but from what I know "Right to be forgotten" has nothing to do with google storing cookies in your web-browser. It is a step in the right direction gone to far, stepping over what is actually important.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Well, Google themselves suggested during discussions with the EU that people should just change their name when their old name has too much stuff connected with it. The Right to be Forgotten is a far better implementation than that, IMO
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    EU should go after the publishers, instead. Actually fix the problem at the root. But they know that'd never go anywhere as people would see how much censorshil it actually is. So instead, they offload the work to Google and get to keep their heads in the sand.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      The EU doesn’t want the information deleted. Imagine I was suspected as criminal once. Then, if someone searches for the case, they should be able to find it. If someone just searches my name, they shouldn’t. The issue isn’t existence of information, but that this information is connected to your name.
caskance 11y ago
No, it is quite simple. You should not gain any right to control information just because the information happens to be about you.
- chinathrow 11y ago
  Tough question, but why not?
  - Goronmon 11y ago
    Freedom of speech.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    Leaving aside implementation practicalities (i.e. the great difficulty of putting the genie/information back in the bottle), it boils down to where someone balances an individual right to privacy relative to the right of other individuals/organizations to say/write whatever they want modulo rather narrow constraints (in the US).As a philosophical matter, I'm not sure there's a right answer and the corner cases are always going to be hard. (e.g. the availability of photos of drunken teenager antics do not exactly contribute to public knowledge/culture/etc. but can potentially be quite harmful for the person in question).
john_b 11y ago
> "At the very least, I like the notion that a person should be able to have some level of control over what companies are allowed to access about them" Yes, but how do the EU regulations in question promote this goal? Background checks still exist, as does the information about you online. These regulations only impose a small burden to finding the information (by eliminating the quickest and most convenient way of finding it). They offer the illusion of control and nothing more. > "My current opinion (which is not yet fully formed) is that it is wrong to order Google to unlist results; but, on the other hand, it should be completely legal to order Google to remove what is essentially a dossier that they have on a particular user (at that user's request)." Again, you're confusing things that are related but not the same. The information cannot be deleted. If Google learned something about you from public sources, that information is in the public domain and Google doesn't own or control it (though it may offer access to it). If it gained that information because you used one or more Google services, then Google has a right to use the information for purposes specified in the EULA. If you want to have control over your information then the only way to accomplish that is to not give it away in the first place. Neither the individual in question nor Google have any ownership over information once it's public. The only question is how easy and convenient accessing that information should be. It only benefits those who are already powerful to make access to information difficult. For example, a company can still find out if you were charged with a crime even if Google doesn't return results related to that event, but you will have a much harder time finding out if that company pollutes the environment (do you want to dig through EPA files or review past court cases against the company?) if news articles relevant to that topic have been expunged from search engines. "The Right to be Forgotten" is just doublespeak for censorship. Selling it as an indispensable tool for personal privacy is a sickening irony.
- kuschku 11y ago
  The Right to be Forgotten only applies to people, not to corporations. The idea is that the stuff you did as teen should not be public for everyone – a future employer, or neighbor, should not be able to find your drunk partying photos on the web (an actual issue currently, where employers openly suggest people to "just stop partying or stop using the web").
- 11y ago

bko 11y ago

I don't see how anything like right to be forgotten can be implemented without essentially internet censorship. Does a corrupt politician have a right to be forgotten forgotten? Former politician? Bank executive? Hedge fund manager? Barbara Streisand? How about those who donate to political causes? The trend seems to be going the other way on that one, at least in the US. What is the criteria and who decides? I can't imagine how such subjectivity would not be abused.

Zikes 11y ago
I believe there should be a framework in place, but that it should be strict yet accessible. An easy example is someone that is arrested but not convicted of a crime. Arrests are public information, and very often people assume that only the guilty are arrested. Combine that with the regular practice of Googling new hires for every job and someone's life could easily be quite literally ruined.
- runako 11y ago
  If a community cares about this, it seems more appropriate to address this at the community level by not publishing arrest records. Far fewer thorny issues are at stake with that decision that there are in censoring data that has been public at some point.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    Collectively, we've never really seriously dealt with information that was historically public but which historically also took considerable effort/interest to access--e.g. it was in a dusty file cabinet in the office of some town clerk who only worked for a few hours on Tuesday and Thursday. Furthermore, it took even more effort/interest/even money to link together such information with other information sources. While there are, in general, a lot of good reasons for transparency in society, there are probably good arguments for keeping certain types of information private now that they're so much easier to access.
- kbenson 11y ago
  One person's guilty looking circumstances are another person's innocent daily routine. Does the picture of the devout Jew carrying a ham qualify?
- bko 11y ago
  Criminal or civil? Should we scrub the internet of OJ Simpson? What about when a trial is taking place, can reporters report on it and then have to purge it from their servers immediately after acquittal? I just don't think it's practical. Even if you believe there is some theoretical framework that would not put undue hardships on all to comply and only be applicable to those causes in which we overwhelmingly agree upon, this isn't the framework that will be applied. The fact is I won't be involved in designing this framework and (presumably) neither will you. In fact, I will likely never even understand the framework. The people who will be involved will be the people with the most at stake and the most amount of money. They will know how the framework works and will be integral in designing it to benefit those same people. Classic regulatory capture. Intentions are not results.
fizzbatter 11y ago
Completely agree. Furthermore, those who seek power will always keep the records - whether it's a black market search engine or various governments, these rights to be forgotten will not fully be forgotten, so what is the ultimate point? As an interesting aside, http://morph.is http://morph.is is hoping to implement Distributed Search, effectively nullifying arguments like this. Which, in my opinion, is for the best.
- ximeng 11y ago
  morph.is looks like it goes a little beyond Distributed Search: "When the World Brain is capable of honestly deciding, it may then rule upon my compensation from the Fund from that point and beyond. I will turn over complete control of the Fund to the World Brain once it is legally or de facto capable of asserting such control."
  - fizzbatter 11y ago
    Oh i completely agree, i just meant it is attempting to do that - i didn't mean just that :) (the other project goals seemed less on-topic, so i didn't bring them up)
goldfeld 11y ago
This is about webpage searches, there's still all of social media for spreading word about public service information. Whereas, if a person is wrongly charged with a crime, should they not at least have a right to not show up in web page searches? No one on social media will want to spread the old, wrong news. So the good the Right to be Forgotten does has no substitute, while what it takes away can be picked up by social media (and search within social media too). That said, I still haven't made up my mind about it.
- belovedeagle 11y ago
  > No one on social media will want to spread the old, wrong news. You can't be serious. This is exactly what happens all the time with internet hate mobs.
  - goldfeld 11y ago
    It's a growing problem, yes, but I see it as a different problem. Social media is by definition people. It's a culture/education problem, because people would spread it on messaging apps (like whatsapp) or even mouth to mouth, so there's seemingly no technological solution to that. It's also easier to discredit information based on who's spreading it. Meanwhile Google is taken as authority on what's relevant. So actually there is something to do with tech we could do: transparent trust chains where you know where information is coming from out of your trusted peers and which trusted peers of theirs. It's very hairy, because trustworthiness in one subject doesn't carry over well in many cases, but maybe machine learning will help us there. That would be a nicer scenario than everyone trusting what Google says should be the most important public things to know about a given person. Even politicians suffer from misinformation spread by opposition, so it's not clear cut even in that case.
- bko 11y ago
  You assume that the legal system is infallible. I don't think it should purged from the public record or search engines. This whole thing reminds me of 1984, where the government alters events in the past by essentially controlling information. I don't like that people are wrongly charged with a crime either. I think as more information about people becomes made available, our culture will shift to become more permissive as to appropriate behavior. As the sexual revolution brought about attitudes towards personal relationships, I think eventually society will be more forgiving with the information available online about a person.
notahacker 11y ago
Unlike former politicians and Barbara Streisland, the people this legislation is designed to help have nothing on the internet about them save for a reference to something embarrassing (often without less-newsworthy context which later exonerates them of the charge/accusation). A search on even the worst of corrupt politicians usually surfaces information on their achievements as well as their failings, and probably highlights a notionally "NPOV" article and their own homepage as the top results. And of course, corrupt politicians, being public figures, end up Streisand-ing themselves if they attempt to abuse the legislation to hide particular articles about their past. As for the actual legislation: there's an opt out for media companies (Google chose not to try to identify as a media company), a public interest defence, and the local "information commissioner" that Google can refer the case to if it doesn't want the cost and risk associated with making its own "right of removal" vs "public interest" evaluations.

fmorel 11y ago

I would prefer that society realize people make mistakes and/or change, and allow others a second chance. Then we wouldn't need the right to be forgotten.

caskance 11y ago
As long as the "right to be forgotten" exists, that will never happen.

jostmey 11y ago

"Right to be forgotten" is the wrong kind of control to give to people over their private information. I can understand why people may not want to be tracked over the internet, but from what I know "Right to be forgotten" has nothing to do with google storing cookies in your web-browser. It is a step in the right direction gone to far, stepping over what is actually important.

kuschku 11y ago
Well, Google themselves suggested during discussions with the EU that people should just change their name when their old name has too much stuff connected with it. The Right to be Forgotten is a far better implementation than that, IMO
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  EU should go after the publishers, instead. Actually fix the problem at the root. But they know that'd never go anywhere as people would see how much censorshil it actually is. So instead, they offload the work to Google and get to keep their heads in the sand.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    The EU doesn’t want the information deleted. Imagine I was suspected as criminal once. Then, if someone searches for the case, they should be able to find it. If someone just searches my name, they shouldn’t. The issue isn’t existence of information, but that this information is connected to your name.

caskance 11y ago

No, it is quite simple. You should not gain any right to control information just because the information happens to be about you.

chinathrow 11y ago
Tough question, but why not?
- Goronmon 11y ago
  Freedom of speech.
- ghaff 11y ago
  Leaving aside implementation practicalities (i.e. the great difficulty of putting the genie/information back in the bottle), it boils down to where someone balances an individual right to privacy relative to the right of other individuals/organizations to say/write whatever they want modulo rather narrow constraints (in the US).As a philosophical matter, I'm not sure there's a right answer and the corner cases are always going to be hard. (e.g. the availability of photos of drunken teenager antics do not exactly contribute to public knowledge/culture/etc. but can potentially be quite harmful for the person in question).

john_b 11y ago

> "At the very least, I like the notion that a person should be able to have some level of control over what companies are allowed to access about them" Yes, but how do the EU regulations in question promote this goal? Background checks still exist, as does the information about you online. These regulations only impose a small burden to finding the information (by eliminating the quickest and most convenient way of finding it). They offer the illusion of control and nothing more. > "My current opinion (which is not yet fully formed) is that it is wrong to order Google to unlist results; but, on the other hand, it should be completely legal to order Google to remove what is essentially a dossier that they have on a particular user (at that user's request)." Again, you're confusing things that are related but not the same. The information cannot be deleted. If Google learned something about you from public sources, that information is in the public domain and Google doesn't own or control it (though it may offer access to it). If it gained that information because you used one or more Google services, then Google has a right to use the information for purposes specified in the EULA. If you want to have control over your information then the only way to accomplish that is to not give it away in the first place. Neither the individual in question nor Google have any ownership over information once it's public. The only question is how easy and convenient accessing that information should be. It only benefits those who are already powerful to make access to information difficult. For example, a company can still find out if you were charged with a crime even if Google doesn't return results related to that event, but you will have a much harder time finding out if that company pollutes the environment (do you want to dig through EPA files or review past court cases against the company?) if news articles relevant to that topic have been expunged from search engines. "The Right to be Forgotten" is just doublespeak for censorship. Selling it as an indispensable tool for personal privacy is a sickening irony.

kuschku 11y ago
The Right to be Forgotten only applies to people, not to corporations. The idea is that the stuff you did as teen should not be public for everyone – a future employer, or neighbor, should not be able to find your drunk partying photos on the web (an actual issue currently, where employers openly suggest people to "just stop partying or stop using the web").
11y ago