8 ms·

Italian Supreme Court: News "expires", online archives would need to be deleted

83 points by eagerToLearn 10y ago

vincnetas 10y ago
When todays news turn into history? Should history also expire then?
MrPatan 10y ago
Also printed ones? Burn all the old newspapers?
ythl 10y ago
We should just pass a new law called "The right to scrub your public image", which allows you to control how the public perceives you or your company online. If someone says something unflattering about you, you can force them to delete it. That's basically what all these European "privacy" laws are amounting to.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  I've always kind of thought a better system would be one that lets you assume a new identity. This is a war that laws won't win. Data will get out, and once it's out, it's near impossible to get back. And people do make mistakes that shouldn't haunt them for the rest of their lives. A better system is one that lets you disassociate with that data.
  - Cerium 10y ago
    Can you imagine the New Identity fraud!
    - CaptSpify 10y ago
      This is a very good point. This is more of a distant idea that I've had, rather than a fully fledged out one, so I'm sure there are plenty of pitfalls that I haven't thought of. Couldn't identity fraud be better handled if we had a system in place for it though? "Oh, my identity was stolen. Time to get a new one!"
  - peeters 10y ago
    A restaurant could do exactly that. If the negative publicity for something they did only a couple of years ago is too much for them, they could change their name in a heartbeat. Instead, what they want is to selectively groom what the internet "remembers" about them. Remove the bad, keep the good.
    - a_humean 10y ago
      There is a local upmarket curry house near me that is quite good and has been around for nearly 5 years winning plenty of local awards for food and service, but on TripAdvisor about 1/5 of the reviews refer to a steak house that was at the same address before this curry house opened. They did not get good reviews and didn't pass health inspections. Even though the curry house changed the owner, name, management, waiting staff, chefs, food sourcing, decor, and menu the reviews are still tied to the address. Fortunately their newer reviews are so glowing that they still get over 4 stars average and their front window is covered in plaques of their awards and their most recent 5/5 health inspection (in the UK its quite common for restaurants to flaunt their 4/5 or 5/5 health report on their front door as advertising - there is no legal requirement to show it except in the city of Hull where now almost every restaurant now has at least 4/5 rating as a consequence given the death sentence that a something below 3/5 represents).
  - goda90 10y ago
    It'd be pretty hard to get the new identity without revealing that you are in fact changing from identity X to identity Y. Because if that tidbit gets out, an algorithm can easily reassociate all the data of identity X with identity Y.
- halflings 10y ago
  The EU's privacy laws are much broader than the "right to be forgotten" (which do not apply to public figures anyway, as Google has shown in the past). When a disgruntled ex publishes a page saying you have a bunch of STDs[1], or a company crawls your social media info and starts using it to market some product without your conscent, and these are the first things your cutomers (and/or friends) see when they google you... you're happy takedown requests are a thing and there are laws to protect you.
- panzagl 10y ago
  How does a legal action involving a public business have anything to do with privacy? This isn't someone trying to take down embarrassing vacation photos from a FB page, this is a business trying to hide their misdeeds that were significant enough to be reported on in the first place.
tofu_ink 10y ago
Be sure to burn all the archived articles in libraries. We wouldn't want pesky expired history changing our minds. ... wait aren't online archives identical to hardcopy archives.... Silly me, they are totally different.
- andybak 10y ago
  I'm not defending the ruling but speed of access does make a qualitative difference with genuine implications.
  - tofu_ink 10y ago
    Didn't consider that. However I would suspect anyone that anyone searching for them would rely on 10 seconds on the internet and they would stomp around to other sources.
  - hx87 10y ago
    So...make them available only at certain hours and only over a 56k modem?
    - ythl 10y ago
      Make it only available to the government. Your average citizen shouldn't have access to so much information; only the government should.
tehwalrus 10y ago
"Winston Smith works as a clerk in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents so they match the constantly changing current party line. This involves revising newspaper articles and doctoring photographs—mostly to remove "unpersons," people who have fallen foul of the party. Because of his proximity to the mechanics of rewriting history, Winston Smith nurses doubts about the Party and its monopoly on truth." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Smith https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Smith
- nickff 10y ago
  Thanks for posting this. Many are also persistently pushing to change what is 'acceptable' vocabulary to change how people think, as Orwell described in the Newspeak appendix.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#The_Newspeak_appendix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#The_Newsp...
  - joeframbach 10y ago
    http://alexjs.com/ http://alexjs.com/ for example.
    - sqeaky 10y ago
      In 1984 they weren't trying to adjust the vocabulary to be more inclusive and make every feel more comfortable about open discourse in a fully optional way. They wanted to erase words that could denigrate the party, change the meanings of words that could be used against the party or add new words that could only say good thing about the party. Things libel laws that stop free speech, how many politicians wiggle through the truth or how people who try to mandate political correct speech like extreme SJWs seem like the problems indicated here.
  - tehwalrus 10y ago
    My only beef is when the law comes down hard on language, as per the Italian courts (or minitrue). People arguing about acceptable language (or, essentially, what is ethical and what isn't) is not a bad thing.
tzakrajs 10y ago
So basically, the world is much more peachy and less vile to read about in Italy after 2.5 years. Any economist or business analyst studying the market in Italy now has even less perfect information. Their studies will be based on an alternate, unrealistically positive data and lead to worse outcomes.
placebo 10y ago
Would this also include deleting records that this ruling ever took place, thereby nullifying it?
cmdrfred 10y ago
"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
- taneq 10y ago
  But we've always been at war with the Middle East!
a_humean 10y ago
This appears to be an overzealous extension of the right to be forgotten. The right to be forgotten is a debate worth having as there are individuals that may have historical public records that may be false or no longer in the public interest to be so widely available. E.g: Man falsely but not maliciously accused of rape or murder in press reports and later being exonerated in court without accompanying press report detailing the exoneration, and now finds it very difficult to get a job or start new relationships. Or a business man who filled for bankruptcy 30 years ago who finds search engines return news reports of his bankruptcy as the first and only return on himself and thus makes finding business partners or credit near impossible. These seem like people who need protection from a age when its far far too easy to get access to the historical public record, but removing a factually true report that is just two years old seems a bit extreme; without knowing the full context. What the right to be forgotten should be is some kind of mechanism of adding friction back to the process of getting certain kinds of information when it is in the public interest that this information shouldn't be so easy to get at. It should not be about removing public records altogether. How you do that without inadvertently harming the public interest or allowing abuse seems like a pretty hard or impossible problem.
- ivan_gammel 10y ago
  Totally agree - there should be some friction. I'd say this should put more pressure on search engines, but not on the content archives, so that potentially damaging information could be found only by precise search of the events in the specific period and location regarding the person of interest, not just by name. However, direct search in archive must remain unrestricted. Probably, there should be a legal mechanism similar to US FoIA regarding the personal information collected by non-governmental entities, in accordance to which it could be possible to request the dossier collected by a company on you and use it as a protection from discrimination (as in your first example).
  - a_humean 10y ago
    It could be something as simple as you need to pay a fee for a search query in order to get hold of filtered results, but with no indication that there will be any extra results to find. eg: Search 'John Smith Liverpool UK Murder' and you get nothing interesting and no indication that anything has been filtered. However there is an option that is always available no matter the query to buy this search query for say $1-$50. If you pay up you get the filtered results, which may happen to show that John Smith was once accused of murder many years ago. If you are an investigator, researcher, or journalist then there should be a flat single fee or free access to filtered results.
rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
Hilarious, coming from a country where you can't dig a hole without meticulous verification that you aren't going to damage unbeknownst Ancient Greek/Roman/Renaissance artifacts.
ramblenode 10y ago
They should consider going through and cleaning out the libraries every three years since those tend to accumulate a great deal of historical information.
NoGravitas 10y ago
Old newspapers don't (generally) disappear completely, they just get scarcer and harder to access. I would expect major newspapers to have complete microfilm/microfiche archives of their entire 20th century runs. I would think major libraries would, too. So getting access to a particular newspaper for an arbitrary date generally involves, worst case, a special trip to the offices of the newspaper or a library in the same city as it. What would be needed to do something comparable for online papers? Keep them online, but de-list them from search engines? Take them offline, but keep them in offline storage at newspaper offices and libraries?
- panzagl 10y ago
  So basically make this information only available to the privileged?
  - lloyd-christmas 10y ago
    I suffer from the "privilege" of uniqueness. I'm the only person in the world with my first/last combination. There are 12 living people with my last name, none of us share a first name. A few pages into a google search of me returns high school newspaper clippings from 15-20 years ago. An employer doing a background check on me gets my high jump results from 1999 within 5 minutes. Who's privileged, the 100 people who share the same name, myself, or the person trying to find information about one of those 101 people? I would hope you wouldn't need a golden key to try to track down information, but it would be nice to have my history equally (in)accessible as someone else's.
kylecordes 10y ago
Current historians understand the past by, among many other things, reading old preserved documents including old news. Future historians are going to be real irritated if we get in the habit of purging "expired" news. Well maybe not, maybe if we purge it completely enough we won't even have historians in the future :-)
anexprogrammer 10y ago
Counter View. I don't expect this to sit well with HN. Is everything to be a sentence for life? I, and the law in many places, don't think that's fair. Whilst I don't think 2.5 yrs is the right balance, I do think much reporting should expire to an archive. If a restaurant did something wrong 10 years ago, but clean since (that's in the context of the UK with regular, visible, standards checks), who cares about the old offence? If they're still doing wrong they would probably have other, non-expired, offences in the last 10 years. Here in Europe we have the concept of rehabilitation of offenders. Whilst the UK has a poor reputation for reform (we go for a more US lock 'em up approach), and Gove leaving Justice looks to have put paid to reform for another decade, we have the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act since early 70s. After a varying period past record is considered spent - 2 yrs prison or more is never spent, the rest expire after a period depending on sentence. Fines expire after 7 years I think. So the stupidity your child gets into at 18, whilst out drinking, doesn't pop up in searches when 30 and applying for jobs. Legally you don't need to mention it again apart from some exceptions like applying to be a judge or joining police. The internet is starting to make a mockery of that reasonable intent. The law thinks you can become clean, you have been legally for 15 years, but your potential employer finds a BBC page from 1998, and decides to not extend the offer. That's not reasonable either. Perhaps news should archive in step with laws such as that. Trivia and public order offences expire quickly, 10 year sentences never. Somehow make it a bit less available behind a paywall, or some credentials. I'm talking of intent not practicality. I realise a mirror elsewhere would render that void. In the 80s and 90s it was only the exceptional who got background searches. Manually by searching through archives. Reporters would dig into some suspect politician only when it was something major. That's also the wrong balance and meant many things that should have been known in the public interest didn't come to light simply because it was difficult to check.
- mc32 10y ago
  We definitely need to find a balance between a record of accounts and what accounts can be acted upon. The difficulty here is the mismatch between what people are normally capable of maintaining in their consciousness either individually or local community and what we get from information systems who can record minutiae indefinitely. Before when records were not accessible across jurisdictions for example, there are now reconstructed records of someone being chased out of town for some misdeed and goes and invents a new life for themselves. This is not possible in today's world, unless you're willing to move to third tier countries. Now, there is good and bad in that. But there is also good and bad in everyone's history pertinent or not being available to everyone curious enough to execute a search. People are not machines and I believe should have the right to have some kinds of information about them remain unavailable to other regular people for whom that information has no legal consequence to them.
aaron695 10y ago
People make mistakes. We have never had the chance to genetically deal with or lived in societies where people don't forget. And worse, now can in seconds find about your worst. Do you think in 50 years of life you won't make a mistake (Then 30+ years of people knowing about it) Your small business can be your entire life. We might not be currently solving this issue properly. But it is still an issue we are going to have to deal with.
- ggreer 10y ago
  Complete freedom of communication harms some individuals, but the harms of "right to be forgotten" laws are far greater. No matter how they're tweaked, they must by their very nature punish people for: 1. …conveying public information… 2. …that is true… 3. …to someone who requested it. Any law of that sort is inimical to free expression and ripe for abuse.
dogma1138 10y ago
What was the case about? Overall I have some different views about this, and I'm not sure how to react to some of the cognitive dissonance I notice. On one hand people claim that privacy is paramount, on the other hand they seem to not question what and how becomes a public record, how it is kept and how easily it is accessible. Overall the tone here seems to be that the "right to know" is as important or even more important than privacy which is a huge cognitive dissonance in my book. What's worse is that this seem to be a case where privilege prevails, if you are wealthy you can expunge your record the old fashion way - PR and control the news cycle. If you are not then you are screwed because the 15min of fame are the only thing that the "internet" as a collective seem to care about. I don't know what happened at the restaurant nor do I know if it was important at the time or if it is still now but relevance can be assigned an expiration date. The problem is that you can't "update" the internet, a newspaper isn't going to report that everything is nominal and that nothing happens, news by definition are a record of an abnormal event. I can understand not wanting to have the top result of your restaurant being "4 puppies and a cat found dead, drugs and sign of sexual activity were discovered at the scene" being the top result in Google simply because there has been no "worse" news for the past 2-3 years about the same place. For the most part I can agree with the concept of having to reevaluate the worth of information at a given time and evaluate does it deem the information "newsworthy" and within the public's right to know, anything else is a matter of historic record and gossip and it can still have effect on you today since no one is looking at the date. What happens if some one else buys the restaurant? If the case was due to the misconduct of the previous owner should they be forced to change the name? Should the original owner be forced to rebrand just because something shitty happened at the place outside of their control that has no relevance to the performance of the restaurant or the safety of it's patrons today? Not everything is an important record, saying "you don't know what is important to history" is silly, we can all agree that a war, a presidential election, a huge economic event, a scientific discovery etc. are more important to history than a random local crime or some other misconduct, we can also agree that not having everything available for immediate public access does not equate rewriting history. Overall the 1984 comments are a bit silly, and are a false equivalency no one is claiming that historic public record should be rewritten, no one is claiming that some information should always be accessible, but claiming that information should be accessible regardless of how much damage vs benefit it does at any given time, and stripping all agency from the individual to control how information is published does not bode well for privacy. Maybe Facebook should make everything accessible including things you delete, and if you say well Facebook isn't a newspaper then that argument holds less water every day since Facebook is now aggregating and generating news, and if you claim that you as an individual are not a public figure well how famous do you need to be to count as one? own a business? be a mayor? a celebrity? a government official? rich enough? This is an argument that we desperately need to have and is is a very good sign that this case has been brought up (not necessarily the outcome) because we do need new rules. Being able to effectively "dox" anyone at a push of a button is going to be a big problem, and if you can about privacy and the real definition of it not the current confusion of privacy and secrecy; which is the agency you have to control what and whom you share information with you should care about this, as much if not more than you care about encryption and other technical controls.
tzakrajs 10y ago
Instead of being delusional about people forgetting our past mistakes, why dont we become a more open society that is less judgemental about past mistakes but conscious in this reality.

83 points by eagerToLearn 10y ago

vincnetas 10y ago

When todays news turn into history? Should history also expire then?

MrPatan 10y ago

Also printed ones? Burn all the old newspapers?

ythl 10y ago

We should just pass a new law called "The right to scrub your public image", which allows you to control how the public perceives you or your company online. If someone says something unflattering about you, you can force them to delete it. That's basically what all these European "privacy" laws are amounting to.

CaptSpify 10y ago
I've always kind of thought a better system would be one that lets you assume a new identity. This is a war that laws won't win. Data will get out, and once it's out, it's near impossible to get back. And people do make mistakes that shouldn't haunt them for the rest of their lives. A better system is one that lets you disassociate with that data.
- Cerium 10y ago
  Can you imagine the New Identity fraud!
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    This is a very good point. This is more of a distant idea that I've had, rather than a fully fledged out one, so I'm sure there are plenty of pitfalls that I haven't thought of. Couldn't identity fraud be better handled if we had a system in place for it though? "Oh, my identity was stolen. Time to get a new one!"
- peeters 10y ago
  A restaurant could do exactly that. If the negative publicity for something they did only a couple of years ago is too much for them, they could change their name in a heartbeat. Instead, what they want is to selectively groom what the internet "remembers" about them. Remove the bad, keep the good.
  - a_humean 10y ago
    There is a local upmarket curry house near me that is quite good and has been around for nearly 5 years winning plenty of local awards for food and service, but on TripAdvisor about 1/5 of the reviews refer to a steak house that was at the same address before this curry house opened. They did not get good reviews and didn't pass health inspections. Even though the curry house changed the owner, name, management, waiting staff, chefs, food sourcing, decor, and menu the reviews are still tied to the address. Fortunately their newer reviews are so glowing that they still get over 4 stars average and their front window is covered in plaques of their awards and their most recent 5/5 health inspection (in the UK its quite common for restaurants to flaunt their 4/5 or 5/5 health report on their front door as advertising - there is no legal requirement to show it except in the city of Hull where now almost every restaurant now has at least 4/5 rating as a consequence given the death sentence that a something below 3/5 represents).
- goda90 10y ago
  It'd be pretty hard to get the new identity without revealing that you are in fact changing from identity X to identity Y. Because if that tidbit gets out, an algorithm can easily reassociate all the data of identity X with identity Y.
halflings 10y ago
The EU's privacy laws are much broader than the "right to be forgotten" (which do not apply to public figures anyway, as Google has shown in the past). When a disgruntled ex publishes a page saying you have a bunch of STDs[1], or a company crawls your social media info and starts using it to market some product without your conscent, and these are the first things your cutomers (and/or friends) see when they google you... you're happy takedown requests are a thing and there are laws to protect you.
panzagl 10y ago
How does a legal action involving a public business have anything to do with privacy? This isn't someone trying to take down embarrassing vacation photos from a FB page, this is a business trying to hide their misdeeds that were significant enough to be reported on in the first place.

tofu_ink 10y ago

Be sure to burn all the archived articles in libraries. We wouldn't want pesky expired history changing our minds. ... wait aren't online archives identical to hardcopy archives.... Silly me, they are totally different.

andybak 10y ago
I'm not defending the ruling but speed of access does make a qualitative difference with genuine implications.
- tofu_ink 10y ago
  Didn't consider that. However I would suspect anyone that anyone searching for them would rely on 10 seconds on the internet and they would stomp around to other sources.
- hx87 10y ago
  So...make them available only at certain hours and only over a 56k modem?
  - ythl 10y ago
    Make it only available to the government. Your average citizen shouldn't have access to so much information; only the government should.

tehwalrus 10y ago

"Winston Smith works as a clerk in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents so they match the constantly changing current party line. This involves revising newspaper articles and doctoring photographs—mostly to remove "unpersons," people who have fallen foul of the party. Because of his proximity to the mechanics of rewriting history, Winston Smith nurses doubts about the Party and its monopoly on truth." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Smith https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Smith

nickff 10y ago
Thanks for posting this. Many are also persistently pushing to change what is 'acceptable' vocabulary to change how people think, as Orwell described in the Newspeak appendix.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#The_Newspeak_appendix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#The_Newsp...
- joeframbach 10y ago
  http://alexjs.com/ http://alexjs.com/ for example.
  - sqeaky 10y ago
    In 1984 they weren't trying to adjust the vocabulary to be more inclusive and make every feel more comfortable about open discourse in a fully optional way. They wanted to erase words that could denigrate the party, change the meanings of words that could be used against the party or add new words that could only say good thing about the party. Things libel laws that stop free speech, how many politicians wiggle through the truth or how people who try to mandate political correct speech like extreme SJWs seem like the problems indicated here.
- tehwalrus 10y ago
  My only beef is when the law comes down hard on language, as per the Italian courts (or minitrue). People arguing about acceptable language (or, essentially, what is ethical and what isn't) is not a bad thing.

tzakrajs 10y ago

So basically, the world is much more peachy and less vile to read about in Italy after 2.5 years. Any economist or business analyst studying the market in Italy now has even less perfect information. Their studies will be based on an alternate, unrealistically positive data and lead to worse outcomes.

placebo 10y ago

Would this also include deleting records that this ruling ever took place, thereby nullifying it?

cmdrfred 10y ago

"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."

taneq 10y ago
But we've always been at war with the Middle East!

a_humean 10y ago

This appears to be an overzealous extension of the right to be forgotten. The right to be forgotten is a debate worth having as there are individuals that may have historical public records that may be false or no longer in the public interest to be so widely available. E.g: Man falsely but not maliciously accused of rape or murder in press reports and later being exonerated in court without accompanying press report detailing the exoneration, and now finds it very difficult to get a job or start new relationships. Or a business man who filled for bankruptcy 30 years ago who finds search engines return news reports of his bankruptcy as the first and only return on himself and thus makes finding business partners or credit near impossible. These seem like people who need protection from a age when its far far too easy to get access to the historical public record, but removing a factually true report that is just two years old seems a bit extreme; without knowing the full context. What the right to be forgotten should be is some kind of mechanism of adding friction back to the process of getting certain kinds of information when it is in the public interest that this information shouldn't be so easy to get at. It should not be about removing public records altogether. How you do that without inadvertently harming the public interest or allowing abuse seems like a pretty hard or impossible problem.

ivan_gammel 10y ago
Totally agree - there should be some friction. I'd say this should put more pressure on search engines, but not on the content archives, so that potentially damaging information could be found only by precise search of the events in the specific period and location regarding the person of interest, not just by name. However, direct search in archive must remain unrestricted. Probably, there should be a legal mechanism similar to US FoIA regarding the personal information collected by non-governmental entities, in accordance to which it could be possible to request the dossier collected by a company on you and use it as a protection from discrimination (as in your first example).
- a_humean 10y ago
  It could be something as simple as you need to pay a fee for a search query in order to get hold of filtered results, but with no indication that there will be any extra results to find. eg: Search 'John Smith Liverpool UK Murder' and you get nothing interesting and no indication that anything has been filtered. However there is an option that is always available no matter the query to buy this search query for say $1-$50. If you pay up you get the filtered results, which may happen to show that John Smith was once accused of murder many years ago. If you are an investigator, researcher, or journalist then there should be a flat single fee or free access to filtered results.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago

Hilarious, coming from a country where you can't dig a hole without meticulous verification that you aren't going to damage unbeknownst Ancient Greek/Roman/Renaissance artifacts.

ramblenode 10y ago

They should consider going through and cleaning out the libraries every three years since those tend to accumulate a great deal of historical information.

NoGravitas 10y ago

Old newspapers don't (generally) disappear completely, they just get scarcer and harder to access. I would expect major newspapers to have complete microfilm/microfiche archives of their entire 20th century runs. I would think major libraries would, too. So getting access to a particular newspaper for an arbitrary date generally involves, worst case, a special trip to the offices of the newspaper or a library in the same city as it. What would be needed to do something comparable for online papers? Keep them online, but de-list them from search engines? Take them offline, but keep them in offline storage at newspaper offices and libraries?

panzagl 10y ago
So basically make this information only available to the privileged?
- lloyd-christmas 10y ago
  I suffer from the "privilege" of uniqueness. I'm the only person in the world with my first/last combination. There are 12 living people with my last name, none of us share a first name. A few pages into a google search of me returns high school newspaper clippings from 15-20 years ago. An employer doing a background check on me gets my high jump results from 1999 within 5 minutes. Who's privileged, the 100 people who share the same name, myself, or the person trying to find information about one of those 101 people? I would hope you wouldn't need a golden key to try to track down information, but it would be nice to have my history equally (in)accessible as someone else's.

kylecordes 10y ago

Current historians understand the past by, among many other things, reading old preserved documents including old news. Future historians are going to be real irritated if we get in the habit of purging "expired" news. Well maybe not, maybe if we purge it completely enough we won't even have historians in the future :-)

anexprogrammer 10y ago

Counter View. I don't expect this to sit well with HN. Is everything to be a sentence for life? I, and the law in many places, don't think that's fair. Whilst I don't think 2.5 yrs is the right balance, I do think much reporting should expire to an archive. If a restaurant did something wrong 10 years ago, but clean since (that's in the context of the UK with regular, visible, standards checks), who cares about the old offence? If they're still doing wrong they would probably have other, non-expired, offences in the last 10 years. Here in Europe we have the concept of rehabilitation of offenders. Whilst the UK has a poor reputation for reform (we go for a more US lock 'em up approach), and Gove leaving Justice looks to have put paid to reform for another decade, we have the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act since early 70s. After a varying period past record is considered spent - 2 yrs prison or more is never spent, the rest expire after a period depending on sentence. Fines expire after 7 years I think. So the stupidity your child gets into at 18, whilst out drinking, doesn't pop up in searches when 30 and applying for jobs. Legally you don't need to mention it again apart from some exceptions like applying to be a judge or joining police. The internet is starting to make a mockery of that reasonable intent. The law thinks you can become clean, you have been legally for 15 years, but your potential employer finds a BBC page from 1998, and decides to not extend the offer. That's not reasonable either. Perhaps news should archive in step with laws such as that. Trivia and public order offences expire quickly, 10 year sentences never. Somehow make it a bit less available behind a paywall, or some credentials. I'm talking of intent not practicality. I realise a mirror elsewhere would render that void. In the 80s and 90s it was only the exceptional who got background searches. Manually by searching through archives. Reporters would dig into some suspect politician only when it was something major. That's also the wrong balance and meant many things that should have been known in the public interest didn't come to light simply because it was difficult to check.

mc32 10y ago
We definitely need to find a balance between a record of accounts and what accounts can be acted upon. The difficulty here is the mismatch between what people are normally capable of maintaining in their consciousness either individually or local community and what we get from information systems who can record minutiae indefinitely. Before when records were not accessible across jurisdictions for example, there are now reconstructed records of someone being chased out of town for some misdeed and goes and invents a new life for themselves. This is not possible in today's world, unless you're willing to move to third tier countries. Now, there is good and bad in that. But there is also good and bad in everyone's history pertinent or not being available to everyone curious enough to execute a search. People are not machines and I believe should have the right to have some kinds of information about them remain unavailable to other regular people for whom that information has no legal consequence to them.

aaron695 10y ago

People make mistakes. We have never had the chance to genetically deal with or lived in societies where people don't forget. And worse, now can in seconds find about your worst. Do you think in 50 years of life you won't make a mistake (Then 30+ years of people knowing about it) Your small business can be your entire life. We might not be currently solving this issue properly. But it is still an issue we are going to have to deal with.

ggreer 10y ago
Complete freedom of communication harms some individuals, but the harms of "right to be forgotten" laws are far greater. No matter how they're tweaked, they must by their very nature punish people for: 1. …conveying public information… 2. …that is true… 3. …to someone who requested it. Any law of that sort is inimical to free expression and ripe for abuse.

dogma1138 10y ago

What was the case about? Overall I have some different views about this, and I'm not sure how to react to some of the cognitive dissonance I notice. On one hand people claim that privacy is paramount, on the other hand they seem to not question what and how becomes a public record, how it is kept and how easily it is accessible. Overall the tone here seems to be that the "right to know" is as important or even more important than privacy which is a huge cognitive dissonance in my book. What's worse is that this seem to be a case where privilege prevails, if you are wealthy you can expunge your record the old fashion way - PR and control the news cycle. If you are not then you are screwed because the 15min of fame are the only thing that the "internet" as a collective seem to care about. I don't know what happened at the restaurant nor do I know if it was important at the time or if it is still now but relevance can be assigned an expiration date. The problem is that you can't "update" the internet, a newspaper isn't going to report that everything is nominal and that nothing happens, news by definition are a record of an abnormal event. I can understand not wanting to have the top result of your restaurant being "4 puppies and a cat found dead, drugs and sign of sexual activity were discovered at the scene" being the top result in Google simply because there has been no "worse" news for the past 2-3 years about the same place. For the most part I can agree with the concept of having to reevaluate the worth of information at a given time and evaluate does it deem the information "newsworthy" and within the public's right to know, anything else is a matter of historic record and gossip and it can still have effect on you today since no one is looking at the date. What happens if some one else buys the restaurant? If the case was due to the misconduct of the previous owner should they be forced to change the name? Should the original owner be forced to rebrand just because something shitty happened at the place outside of their control that has no relevance to the performance of the restaurant or the safety of it's patrons today? Not everything is an important record, saying "you don't know what is important to history" is silly, we can all agree that a war, a presidential election, a huge economic event, a scientific discovery etc. are more important to history than a random local crime or some other misconduct, we can also agree that not having everything available for immediate public access does not equate rewriting history. Overall the 1984 comments are a bit silly, and are a false equivalency no one is claiming that historic public record should be rewritten, no one is claiming that some information should always be accessible, but claiming that information should be accessible regardless of how much damage vs benefit it does at any given time, and stripping all agency from the individual to control how information is published does not bode well for privacy. Maybe Facebook should make everything accessible including things you delete, and if you say well Facebook isn't a newspaper then that argument holds less water every day since Facebook is now aggregating and generating news, and if you claim that you as an individual are not a public figure well how famous do you need to be to count as one? own a business? be a mayor? a celebrity? a government official? rich enough? This is an argument that we desperately need to have and is is a very good sign that this case has been brought up (not necessarily the outcome) because we do need new rules. Being able to effectively "dox" anyone at a push of a button is going to be a big problem, and if you can about privacy and the real definition of it not the current confusion of privacy and secrecy; which is the agency you have to control what and whom you share information with you should care about this, as much if not more than you care about encryption and other technical controls.

tzakrajs 10y ago

Instead of being delusional about people forgetting our past mistakes, why dont we become a more open society that is less judgemental about past mistakes but conscious in this reality.