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As someone else mentioned on this thread, there's little distinction in search engine results between something that happened yesterday and something that happe
by redler 9y ago
As someone else mentioned on this thread, there's little distinction in search engine results between something that happened yesterday and something that happened 20 years ago. We now have the phenomenon of information no longer "aging". We've always had "news" to tell us what's, well, new. But over time that information would age. It would become harder to recall, and take more work to retrieve. A story on the evening news would later be in the paper, perhaps in a magazine a month later, then in a book a year after that. The book would move off the bestseller lists, the newspaper onto microfiche, and the magazine into the stacks of big libraries, or oblivion. The moving finger would write, and having written, move on.
But now it all lives forever, whether true or false, fresh and available and effortlessly findable by anybody, with no decay or attrition. It's a new and qualitatively different thing. The "right to be forgotten" feels like some attempt, probably quixotic, to align this new situation with the information decay expectations we've all had from the beginning of humanity right up until this very moment.
- freeone3000 9y agoAs someone whose first memories start after computers existed: This is ridiculous. People need to fix themselves. They need to adjust their values judgements, understand the purpose of 'last modified time', and adapt to the new world. Computers aren't going to become better at forgetting because a legislature or a court has decided they should.
- zeth___ 9y agoComputers aren't the problem, search engines are. There is nothing in the spec of a Turing machine that says "And this will remember what you did last Tuesday forever". It is a specific program that is written for a specific purpose. We have made the spam message network illegal to run I see no fundamental issue with extending this to other areas where it benefits society.
- visarga 9y ago"Old news" - what an oxymoron! I agree with you - the real answer is to change how we react to personal blunders, we all have our bad moments and now they are forever logged and accessible.
- visarga 9y agobtw, I see I got hammered, "oxymoron" is not a kind of moron.