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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. Whil

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.
Retric 10y ago
If we want something to be forgotten in X years we are better off blocking it being published. For example, I would argue that zero pre-conviction 'news' should be published about a defendant. It's directly counter to the idea of innocent until proven guilty. ED: One option might be to automatically use a different name. If I stop using "Retric" all my HN posts are divorced from my name. Abstractly, hearing about a 9/11 survivor by name adds nothing vs some made up name. A random picture of someone drinking will be forgotten if it's not linked to your name. Companies often change names to get away from bad publicity.
- buro9 10y ago
  My wife has the issue that she was the victim of a crime, and the news reported her in detail as the perp was underage and they couldn't publish his name. The result, my wife has had work colleagues ask about it, and one implied that she may have done something wrong to invite trouble. The victims and innocent in an incident can be affected by reportage too. We're European, and she tried to exercise the Right to be Forgotten, but Google haven't responded and it remains there when her name is searched. Her career may be being impacted, by having been a victim of a crime. This occurred 5 years ago, and is still mentioned from time to time.
  - asbestas 10y ago
    This makes me so angry. Your poor wife! We have laws to protect the identity of victims in many cases in the USA for this very reason. We really need to draw a firm line about this "blame the victim" behavior. I haven't experienced it in any grave crime, but I had my bicycle stolen and instantly had to deal with a litany of people saying I shouldn't have locked it with a cable lock (I wasn't even using a cable lock), I shouldn't have put it where thieves could see it, etc. We all know it's 1000x worse for other crimes, like sex crimes. Victim blaming is comforting because it saves the blamers from the knowledge that life deals random blows and it could happen to anyone, including them. They'd much rather think that they are smart and safe, and that the victim did something wrong.
  - AlgorithmicTime 10y ago
danso 10y ago
It's a tough thing in some cases. When I was in college, it was very normal to print the names of students in the police blotter (e.g. "John Smith, sophomore in engineering, was booked on charges of public nudity on Friday"). The internet existed but Googling things was not a mainstream habit. Nowadays, I think many college blotters anonymize the names, and that feels right to me. We have a right to know what's on campus, but fucking up as a drunk college student shouldn't affect your post-college life. But an expiry date, if I'm reading this right, of a few years? Many trial processes don't finish up by then. In my journalism class, I force the students to go on Lexis Nexis and find 10-20 articles in the past decade or older that have been written about whatever they're writing about. Primarily to make them realize that whatever they think is new is not new, and to challenge them to pursue a story that looks at the big picture. Making it harder to find stories in the past only adds to the dumbification and self-absorption of society.
- mcherm 10y ago
  > Many trial processes don't finish up by then. In this particular case the trial that was being reported on has not yet finished.
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  The legal expiry timer starts at date of sentence. A John Smith might end up locally famous for a while, regret those Tequila shots leading to nude in the town square, damaging a statue, and a £500 fine. Some years after the magistrate passes sentence it ceases to exist and he's not obliged to tell. If you get three years for something more serious it never expires. If you're John Smith you're in luck having a common name, but if you have a rare name... In former years the reporting is in some dusty library or newspaper microfiche archive forgotten until he runs for Prime Minister perhaps. There's lots of cases where an innocent accused, or sometimes even the victim, can suffer significant reputational damage from a widely reported case. The adversarial system, and occasional trials by media, seems to encourage that. I don't think having older, expired, reports of more minor offences moved to archive that charges to search, or requires you to have journalism ID or something leads to dumbification of anything. It shouldn't cease to exist, just become far less trivial to get at. More an attempt to restore balance, regardless of practicality. A bad debt, even a lot of bad debt, expires in 5 or 6 years from your credit report, but a minor offence 20 years ago doesn't?
strathmeyer 10y ago
Yes that's how the world works. We don't change the laws to suit those whose thoughts fight with reality.
guelo 10y ago
"X happened" is a historical fact. You cannot change the fact. You can wish it were not a fact because then the world would be a more fair just and beautiful place. But your wishes don't matter, the fact still stands. Like millions of dinosaurs wishing the asteroid hadn't hit because it would make their world better, it doesn't matter, the fact still stands.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  >Like millions of dinosaurs wishing the asteroid hadn't hit because it would make their world better, it doesn't matter, the fact still stands. That's what they get for not investing more into a space program. Our turn may be next.
powera 10y ago
So it's better to legally require concealing the truth than it is to prevent employers from discriminating in this way?
sqeaky 10y ago
The information won't actually disappear. That is just not how information and markets work. The information will still be kept by legitimate archivists. If it can be kept by them it can be kept by governments. It can be kept by blackmailers It can be kept by accidents in old backups. There will be someone selling this information. This just hides the issue while creating a massive tool for future censorship and new black market. Any reasonable person will look back 10 years and see that the person posting stupid stuff on Facebook while drunk has cleaned up their act. Forcing the information to be hidden doesn't help, it just hides that you might be dealing with unreasonable people even if you would rather not.
blacksmith_tb 10y ago
These are non-issues, broadly. The hypothetical restaurant that had bad press / reviews / etc. long ago will be critically evaluated by the public, who are not incapable of coming to the conclusion you suggest, that 10 years of no (or good) news outweighs the old blot on their record. If employers of the future use data mining to expose every trivial misstep of candidates for hire and then turn away all those who aren't perfect, they won't have any employees. In fact, it reminds more than a little of the difference between having a credit history, however bad, vs. having no credit history at all - typically lenders are much more wary of no history, rather than a bad one (within reason).
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  Spoken like someone who hasn't been turned away from a job due to something trivial showing up on a background check from over 10 years ago (this has happened to me, ordinance violation from a college town where my tenants destroyed the front yard when I was just starting to learn what being a landlord meant in my early 20s), as well as being denied credit due to a black mark 6 years ago (also has happened, even though the financial situation that caused the black mark has been resolved long ago; have to wait the full 7.5 years, and even then, you must apply to have the old negative credit line record removed). Its easy to say "these are non-issues" when they're not happening to you. Now I'm that guy who has scrubbed his Twitter feed, locked down his Facebook privacy settings, does everything possible not to leak personal information online, removes every item I can from my credit reports (good, bad, addresses, employers, whatever; as long as its old enough to be removed, I have it removed), and has paid to have citations as trivial as traffic tickets expunged from my record from years back. I will do everything I can to leave no trace, as you never know what will be used against you in the future.
  - FlowersByIrene 10y ago
    You use a similar handle on another very popular discussion website, and you have recently spoken of doing something across state lines which is likely illegal.

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.

Retric 10y ago

If we want something to be forgotten in X years we are better off blocking it being published. For example, I would argue that zero pre-conviction 'news' should be published about a defendant. It's directly counter to the idea of innocent until proven guilty. ED: One option might be to automatically use a different name. If I stop using "Retric" all my HN posts are divorced from my name. Abstractly, hearing about a 9/11 survivor by name adds nothing vs some made up name. A random picture of someone drinking will be forgotten if it's not linked to your name. Companies often change names to get away from bad publicity.

buro9 10y ago
My wife has the issue that she was the victim of a crime, and the news reported her in detail as the perp was underage and they couldn't publish his name. The result, my wife has had work colleagues ask about it, and one implied that she may have done something wrong to invite trouble. The victims and innocent in an incident can be affected by reportage too. We're European, and she tried to exercise the Right to be Forgotten, but Google haven't responded and it remains there when her name is searched. Her career may be being impacted, by having been a victim of a crime. This occurred 5 years ago, and is still mentioned from time to time.
- asbestas 10y ago
  This makes me so angry. Your poor wife! We have laws to protect the identity of victims in many cases in the USA for this very reason. We really need to draw a firm line about this "blame the victim" behavior. I haven't experienced it in any grave crime, but I had my bicycle stolen and instantly had to deal with a litany of people saying I shouldn't have locked it with a cable lock (I wasn't even using a cable lock), I shouldn't have put it where thieves could see it, etc. We all know it's 1000x worse for other crimes, like sex crimes. Victim blaming is comforting because it saves the blamers from the knowledge that life deals random blows and it could happen to anyone, including them. They'd much rather think that they are smart and safe, and that the victim did something wrong.
- AlgorithmicTime 10y ago

danso 10y ago

It's a tough thing in some cases. When I was in college, it was very normal to print the names of students in the police blotter (e.g. "John Smith, sophomore in engineering, was booked on charges of public nudity on Friday"). The internet existed but Googling things was not a mainstream habit. Nowadays, I think many college blotters anonymize the names, and that feels right to me. We have a right to know what's on campus, but fucking up as a drunk college student shouldn't affect your post-college life. But an expiry date, if I'm reading this right, of a few years? Many trial processes don't finish up by then. In my journalism class, I force the students to go on Lexis Nexis and find 10-20 articles in the past decade or older that have been written about whatever they're writing about. Primarily to make them realize that whatever they think is new is not new, and to challenge them to pursue a story that looks at the big picture. Making it harder to find stories in the past only adds to the dumbification and self-absorption of society.

mcherm 10y ago
> Many trial processes don't finish up by then. In this particular case the trial that was being reported on has not yet finished.
anexprogrammer 10y ago
The legal expiry timer starts at date of sentence. A John Smith might end up locally famous for a while, regret those Tequila shots leading to nude in the town square, damaging a statue, and a £500 fine. Some years after the magistrate passes sentence it ceases to exist and he's not obliged to tell. If you get three years for something more serious it never expires. If you're John Smith you're in luck having a common name, but if you have a rare name... In former years the reporting is in some dusty library or newspaper microfiche archive forgotten until he runs for Prime Minister perhaps. There's lots of cases where an innocent accused, or sometimes even the victim, can suffer significant reputational damage from a widely reported case. The adversarial system, and occasional trials by media, seems to encourage that. I don't think having older, expired, reports of more minor offences moved to archive that charges to search, or requires you to have journalism ID or something leads to dumbification of anything. It shouldn't cease to exist, just become far less trivial to get at. More an attempt to restore balance, regardless of practicality. A bad debt, even a lot of bad debt, expires in 5 or 6 years from your credit report, but a minor offence 20 years ago doesn't?

strathmeyer 10y ago

Yes that's how the world works. We don't change the laws to suit those whose thoughts fight with reality.

guelo 10y ago

"X happened" is a historical fact. You cannot change the fact. You can wish it were not a fact because then the world would be a more fair just and beautiful place. But your wishes don't matter, the fact still stands. Like millions of dinosaurs wishing the asteroid hadn't hit because it would make their world better, it doesn't matter, the fact still stands.

Grishnakh 10y ago
>Like millions of dinosaurs wishing the asteroid hadn't hit because it would make their world better, it doesn't matter, the fact still stands. That's what they get for not investing more into a space program. Our turn may be next.

powera 10y ago

So it's better to legally require concealing the truth than it is to prevent employers from discriminating in this way?

sqeaky 10y ago

The information won't actually disappear. That is just not how information and markets work. The information will still be kept by legitimate archivists. If it can be kept by them it can be kept by governments. It can be kept by blackmailers It can be kept by accidents in old backups. There will be someone selling this information. This just hides the issue while creating a massive tool for future censorship and new black market. Any reasonable person will look back 10 years and see that the person posting stupid stuff on Facebook while drunk has cleaned up their act. Forcing the information to be hidden doesn't help, it just hides that you might be dealing with unreasonable people even if you would rather not.

blacksmith_tb 10y ago

These are non-issues, broadly. The hypothetical restaurant that had bad press / reviews / etc. long ago will be critically evaluated by the public, who are not incapable of coming to the conclusion you suggest, that 10 years of no (or good) news outweighs the old blot on their record. If employers of the future use data mining to expose every trivial misstep of candidates for hire and then turn away all those who aren't perfect, they won't have any employees. In fact, it reminds more than a little of the difference between having a credit history, however bad, vs. having no credit history at all - typically lenders are much more wary of no history, rather than a bad one (within reason).

toomuchtodo 10y ago
Spoken like someone who hasn't been turned away from a job due to something trivial showing up on a background check from over 10 years ago (this has happened to me, ordinance violation from a college town where my tenants destroyed the front yard when I was just starting to learn what being a landlord meant in my early 20s), as well as being denied credit due to a black mark 6 years ago (also has happened, even though the financial situation that caused the black mark has been resolved long ago; have to wait the full 7.5 years, and even then, you must apply to have the old negative credit line record removed). Its easy to say "these are non-issues" when they're not happening to you. Now I'm that guy who has scrubbed his Twitter feed, locked down his Facebook privacy settings, does everything possible not to leak personal information online, removes every item I can from my credit reports (good, bad, addresses, employers, whatever; as long as its old enough to be removed, I have it removed), and has paid to have citations as trivial as traffic tickets expunged from my record from years back. I will do everything I can to leave no trace, as you never know what will be used against you in the future.
- FlowersByIrene 10y ago
  You use a similar handle on another very popular discussion website, and you have recently spoken of doing something across state lines which is likely illegal.