7 ms·

The ‘right to be forgotten’ is backwards. Much better would be a 'right to remember'. The right to be forgotten is a positive right, in that it requires other p

The ‘right to be forgotten’ is backwards. Much better would be a 'right to remember'. The right to be forgotten is a positive right, in that it requires other people to take action (e.g. delist a story from Google) to fulfill it. A right to remember would be a negative right. Like a freedom of the press doesn't require the government to subsidize a printing press or equivalent, a right to remember would just mean that the state can't compel anyone to delist a story, etc. Positive rights are more open to abuse, and better serve the centralization of power. A right to be forgotten cannot be applied without infringing on someone else's right to speak about what must be forgotten, as in the case of forcing Google to delist something. A right to remember only infringes on the very dubious "right" to control someone else's speech and/or memory prosthetics, e.g search engines.

qntty 8y ago
How would that accomplish the same thing? That's like saying that you don't like that a "right to an education" is a positive right so it should instead be the "right to be ignorant". Either you think that people should be able to move on and be forgotten or you don't. Deciding between positive and negative rights is just a matter of strategy.
drawnwren 8y ago
At first glance, this seems like a solid argument. However, there are plenty of positive rights that we agree on. The right to an education is a positive right (while we disagree over this after high school, I don't think anyone is saying children don't deserve this). How about the right to personal safety? Sometimes it's negative, but it can be positive when dealing with negligence. Overall, I agree on the surface with your positive/negative distinction but I'm not sure the world works this way in practice.
matt4077 8y ago
Apart from the SVM-like attempt to find some strange characteristics that separate the rights you happen to like from those you don't, I fail to see how this little tale relates to a private publisher setting its own policy.
notafraudster 8y ago
Positive rights and negative rights often clash, as the tension you correctly describe shows, but the implicit premise of your post is that all negative rights supersede all positive rights. I do not agree. The very conceptualization of negative rights was in response to a feeling that the positive rights guaranteed by earlier liberal thought were insufficient to secure a just and free society. It is far from obvious to me that there should be an expansive and universal right to be forgotten. But the position that there obviously should not be strikes me as ignorant to the changing balance of power between those two conceptions of the good. No one asked for a right to be forgotten by erasing 30 year old newspaper coverage. And they ask for it now not because the list of things people wish were forgotten has changed; rather, it because technology has driven social change in terms of what forgetting occurs and what the consequences of that are. I think it naive that we would pre-assume the balance between those two rights would not change in light of that. I also think it is possible to have a richer discussion about the issue if we do not immediately get bogged down in the contractualism that so often swamps out discussions about "rights".
- ksdale 8y ago
  I think this is an excellent point. I have no idea what the right answer is, but I think that the role of technology is really underappreciated. On the one hand, people are probably correct to say that it's an infringement on their rights to not be able to talk about something that happened to them. On the other hand, what it means to "talk about something" has changed radically. One hundred years ago, your reach would have been limited to the people in your social circle. If you were really determined to let people know what happened to you, you could take out an ad in the newspaper, but that would probably be seen as fairly weird if it was about something that happened years ago where the perpetrator has already been released from prison. What about if the perpetrator decided to go live somewhere else, and the victim personally took it upon themselves to take out an ad in every city that the perpetrator moved to, telling everyone what happened. I daresay that person would be looked at as vindictive and possibly a little crazy. The internet allows basically the last scenario, with very little effort on behalf of the victim, and none of the cost of publishing in a newspaper. It possibly even comes without the social cost of looking vindictive. Because it's so much easier to publish things online, no one considers the emotion that would be required to generate the post, as opposed to the strength of feeling required to get something published in a newspaper in a different city. It seems to me that a discussion of rights without a discussion of technology will not accomplish much, as much as we'd like to believe that what is right is not dependent on something as arbitrary as the current level of tech.
cortesoft 8y ago
Yes, this is always my argument against this sort of thing. Enforcing one person's right to be forgotten is infringing on someone else's right to remember. Say, for example, I get beat up by someone. They are convicted and go to jail, but then in 10 years time they get their record expunged. Am I no longer allowed to tell people about what happened? I should be allowed to tell my story. I should be allowed to tell people what that guy did to me. If I want to write about it, I should be allowed to do that. It is my right to decide how long I want to remember, and who I want to tell. If I don't want to forgive, and I want to tell people "This guy beat me up 10 years ago, I don't think you should have them around", that is my right, too. The government doesn't get to decide how long I can hold that grudge.
- matt4077 8y ago
  Of course you're still allowed to tell people what happened... To understand why some people argue for such a right, you need to appreciate that a report of your crime being the #1 Google hit for a search of your name is fundamentally different than some old acquaintances knowing something. You cannot escape the former, you can not make amends with an archive as you can with people, etc. I know many people are reluctant to see a difference between situations when they exist on a continuum. And yes, there are scenarios every step of the way from "top Google hit" to "one guy knows and could tell if asked". What if you actively went around 20 years later telling the story? What if you kept commenting on every social media post of theirs? But just because there's a gray area somewhere on this spectrum does not imply that we cannot recognise the extremes as distinct situations that require different rules.
  - sk5t 8y ago
    Are you proposing that the rule should be "of course you're still allowed to tell people what happened, but only if you do so inefficiently and with little effect"? What if the top hit is a personal website describing the crime and its effects, rather than a town newspaper--should Google knock that personal website off the front page?
    - 8y ago
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
You have a right to not be murdered (a negative right). But by granting you that right, the government takes away someone else's freedom (a positive right), specifically, their freedom to murder you. Obviously, this is an extreme example, but the idea that "negative rights" are bad because they infringe on someone's "positive rights" makes no sense. You're ignoring the fact that the act of publishing information can cause harm to someone, and that we generally recognize that your rights do not include the right to harm others. Also, your comment fails to recognize that Right To Be Forgotten is very clear on what can and should be forgotten, like false claims, which by news outlets "remembering" them, infringe on the individual being falsely accused.
vokep 8y ago
Not sure why everyone is just following with that terminology - positive/negative rights. All rights are 'negative rights'. What you're calling positive rights are in fact privileges.
- PNWChris 8y ago
  I know the word gets a bad rap, but I feel entitlement is a better word. Driving is a privilege, you have to prove yourself worthy and it can be revoked relatively easily. Voting is (typically) a positive right - an entitlement, it’s guranteed to all citizens with no barrier to entry. Just existing as a citizen is enough (barring circumstances like felony conviction, though personally I’m against removing voting rights under any circumstance).
  - vokep 8y ago
    The word 'right' can be redefined in context sure to make privileges considered as rights, but the typical and most useful meaning of the word is natural rights - that which you have the freedom to do at birth. Of course some rights clash with eachother, which is where some are naturally undone. It was mentioned elsewhere how the right to freedom (and therefore freedom to kill) conflicts with the right to live. The right to freedom gets restricted in that case because that kind of restriction is the most minimal possible reduction of rights, which still allows everyone to maintain their rights. Life>freedom means a reduced right to freedom, and we don't want to do freedom>life as that results in a complete reduction of rights for an innocent individual. So, rights aren't just absolute, they're a bit like the voronoi pattern created by intersecting circles. Privileges on the other hand don't even exist without other people usually. With cars, if one exists, you naturally have the right to get in one and drive it...until you're in a society with other cars. Then, it is difficult to exercise your right to drive a car without infringing on others, so much so that the right is entirely reduced and transformed into a privilege: you do not have the right to drive a car unless the state (societal structure) has confirmed you can do so safely.
moorhosj 8y ago
In your view, are libel laws an infringement on my right to speak however I want about somebody else?

qntty 8y ago

How would that accomplish the same thing? That's like saying that you don't like that a "right to an education" is a positive right so it should instead be the "right to be ignorant". Either you think that people should be able to move on and be forgotten or you don't. Deciding between positive and negative rights is just a matter of strategy.

drawnwren 8y ago

At first glance, this seems like a solid argument. However, there are plenty of positive rights that we agree on. The right to an education is a positive right (while we disagree over this after high school, I don't think anyone is saying children don't deserve this). How about the right to personal safety? Sometimes it's negative, but it can be positive when dealing with negligence. Overall, I agree on the surface with your positive/negative distinction but I'm not sure the world works this way in practice.

matt4077 8y ago

Apart from the SVM-like attempt to find some strange characteristics that separate the rights you happen to like from those you don't, I fail to see how this little tale relates to a private publisher setting its own policy.

notafraudster 8y ago

Positive rights and negative rights often clash, as the tension you correctly describe shows, but the implicit premise of your post is that all negative rights supersede all positive rights. I do not agree. The very conceptualization of negative rights was in response to a feeling that the positive rights guaranteed by earlier liberal thought were insufficient to secure a just and free society. It is far from obvious to me that there should be an expansive and universal right to be forgotten. But the position that there obviously should not be strikes me as ignorant to the changing balance of power between those two conceptions of the good. No one asked for a right to be forgotten by erasing 30 year old newspaper coverage. And they ask for it now not because the list of things people wish were forgotten has changed; rather, it because technology has driven social change in terms of what forgetting occurs and what the consequences of that are. I think it naive that we would pre-assume the balance between those two rights would not change in light of that. I also think it is possible to have a richer discussion about the issue if we do not immediately get bogged down in the contractualism that so often swamps out discussions about "rights".

ksdale 8y ago
I think this is an excellent point. I have no idea what the right answer is, but I think that the role of technology is really underappreciated. On the one hand, people are probably correct to say that it's an infringement on their rights to not be able to talk about something that happened to them. On the other hand, what it means to "talk about something" has changed radically. One hundred years ago, your reach would have been limited to the people in your social circle. If you were really determined to let people know what happened to you, you could take out an ad in the newspaper, but that would probably be seen as fairly weird if it was about something that happened years ago where the perpetrator has already been released from prison. What about if the perpetrator decided to go live somewhere else, and the victim personally took it upon themselves to take out an ad in every city that the perpetrator moved to, telling everyone what happened. I daresay that person would be looked at as vindictive and possibly a little crazy. The internet allows basically the last scenario, with very little effort on behalf of the victim, and none of the cost of publishing in a newspaper. It possibly even comes without the social cost of looking vindictive. Because it's so much easier to publish things online, no one considers the emotion that would be required to generate the post, as opposed to the strength of feeling required to get something published in a newspaper in a different city. It seems to me that a discussion of rights without a discussion of technology will not accomplish much, as much as we'd like to believe that what is right is not dependent on something as arbitrary as the current level of tech.

cortesoft 8y ago

Yes, this is always my argument against this sort of thing. Enforcing one person's right to be forgotten is infringing on someone else's right to remember. Say, for example, I get beat up by someone. They are convicted and go to jail, but then in 10 years time they get their record expunged. Am I no longer allowed to tell people about what happened? I should be allowed to tell my story. I should be allowed to tell people what that guy did to me. If I want to write about it, I should be allowed to do that. It is my right to decide how long I want to remember, and who I want to tell. If I don't want to forgive, and I want to tell people "This guy beat me up 10 years ago, I don't think you should have them around", that is my right, too. The government doesn't get to decide how long I can hold that grudge.

matt4077 8y ago
Of course you're still allowed to tell people what happened... To understand why some people argue for such a right, you need to appreciate that a report of your crime being the #1 Google hit for a search of your name is fundamentally different than some old acquaintances knowing something. You cannot escape the former, you can not make amends with an archive as you can with people, etc. I know many people are reluctant to see a difference between situations when they exist on a continuum. And yes, there are scenarios every step of the way from "top Google hit" to "one guy knows and could tell if asked". What if you actively went around 20 years later telling the story? What if you kept commenting on every social media post of theirs? But just because there's a gray area somewhere on this spectrum does not imply that we cannot recognise the extremes as distinct situations that require different rules.
- sk5t 8y ago
  Are you proposing that the rule should be "of course you're still allowed to tell people what happened, but only if you do so inefficiently and with little effect"? What if the top hit is a personal website describing the crime and its effects, rather than a town newspaper--should Google knock that personal website off the front page?
  - 8y ago

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

You have a right to not be murdered (a negative right). But by granting you that right, the government takes away someone else's freedom (a positive right), specifically, their freedom to murder you. Obviously, this is an extreme example, but the idea that "negative rights" are bad because they infringe on someone's "positive rights" makes no sense. You're ignoring the fact that the act of publishing information can cause harm to someone, and that we generally recognize that your rights do not include the right to harm others. Also, your comment fails to recognize that Right To Be Forgotten is very clear on what can and should be forgotten, like false claims, which by news outlets "remembering" them, infringe on the individual being falsely accused.

vokep 8y ago

Not sure why everyone is just following with that terminology - positive/negative rights. All rights are 'negative rights'. What you're calling positive rights are in fact privileges.

PNWChris 8y ago
I know the word gets a bad rap, but I feel entitlement is a better word. Driving is a privilege, you have to prove yourself worthy and it can be revoked relatively easily. Voting is (typically) a positive right - an entitlement, it’s guranteed to all citizens with no barrier to entry. Just existing as a citizen is enough (barring circumstances like felony conviction, though personally I’m against removing voting rights under any circumstance).
- vokep 8y ago
  The word 'right' can be redefined in context sure to make privileges considered as rights, but the typical and most useful meaning of the word is natural rights - that which you have the freedom to do at birth. Of course some rights clash with eachother, which is where some are naturally undone. It was mentioned elsewhere how the right to freedom (and therefore freedom to kill) conflicts with the right to live. The right to freedom gets restricted in that case because that kind of restriction is the most minimal possible reduction of rights, which still allows everyone to maintain their rights. Life>freedom means a reduced right to freedom, and we don't want to do freedom>life as that results in a complete reduction of rights for an innocent individual. So, rights aren't just absolute, they're a bit like the voronoi pattern created by intersecting circles. Privileges on the other hand don't even exist without other people usually. With cars, if one exists, you naturally have the right to get in one and drive it...until you're in a society with other cars. Then, it is difficult to exercise your right to drive a car without infringing on others, so much so that the right is entirely reduced and transformed into a privilege: you do not have the right to drive a car unless the state (societal structure) has confirmed you can do so safely.

moorhosj 8y ago

In your view, are libel laws an infringement on my right to speak however I want about somebody else?