4 ms·

Where's the right to forget? If someone takes a photo of my driver's license and posts it on their website, does their right to communicate (and remember) over

Where's the right to forget? If someone takes a photo of my driver's license and posts it on their website, does their right to communicate (and remember) override my right to have that photo deleted?

whytaka 7y ago
Pedantic but the wording would be, "The right to be forgotten".
danShumway 7y ago
Yes. I realize that the privacy community is diverse, and different people have different opinions on this. In general, I've tried to be vague enough with how I stated rights so that they could be applied to multiple different situations. I wanted there to be a little bit of leeway and ambiguity. However, on this point in particular, I take a hard stance: > Users have the right to share information with others, to share indexes of that information with others, and to tell other people that the information exists. I explicitly mentioned indexes to respond to people who claim that forcing information to be de-indexed or removing it from search queries isn't the same as censoring that information. I respect people who believe that, but I think they're wrong.
- glitchc 7y ago
  According to your logic then, if I use a service to store personal artifacts online, then the vendor providing that service can use or modify those artifacts in any way they see fit. My only protection or recourse seems to be to limit participation to useless or irrelevant information. How is that any different from the present day Internet? Any digital bill of rights that doesn’t protect my rights to my own information is worthless.
  - kick 7y ago
    There's established precedent in the United States that photos of you aren't "yours." Any other circumstance means that journalists and others can't expose bad behavior without getting litigated.
    - dbtx 7y ago
      But it's not just a photo, and in any case, a driver's license isn't yours either. It's a government issued official document, and they can require that you return it at any time. So there are even more rules to have to worry about now, hooray... I verified my ID for Freelancer.com once. They wanted a scan of your ID and a picture of you holding up the same ID and a random number they provided. A picture of your ID that someone got off a website is indistinguishable from a picture of a picture of your ID. A picture of you holding your ID is indistinguishable from a picture of you holding a picture of your ID. It could easily have been a deepfake. I think this is a real problem and the right to communicate isn't stronger or deeper than the right to prevent illegal or provably harmful communications. (yes 'illegal' can become twisted, I'm limiting to just the painfully obvious things that everyone finds unacceptable (except would-be criminals)) (yes 'criminals' is frequently defined in terms of what's already illegal so I'm just making a fine mess here but while we're at it, let's appeal to the expectations of 'decent' people and then we just bounced it back to definition of 'decent' ad nauseum... ok I'm done)
      - kick 7y ago
        A picture of a driver's license is the property of the photographer. Richard Prince is a millionaire for taking pictures of others' intellectual property and then auctioning it off, for example.
        aeneasmackenzie 7y ago
        Which is absurd: It's illegal for me to take several million pictures of a tv show and sell it.
  - dbtx 7y ago
    Agreed, we still have the right to avoid having one's identity stolen, to take action toward making that more difficult, to protect our one real name IRL. Parent: if you s/driver's license/credit card & CVV visible/, does your position change? It's "just another picture of a thing."
    - danShumway 7y ago
      Good question. As a practical example, I am skeptical that Todd Davis should be able to force Wired to take down his social security number[0]. I am also skeptical that people should be able to demand that HaveIBeenPwned remove their information from a database. On social security numbers or IDs, I am definitely more open to discussing limits to the Right to Remember if they're very narrow and very rigidly defined, in the same way that I'm OK with exceptions to Freedom of Speech that are narrow and rigidly defined. However, I want to posit that if infrastructure around identity verification is broken, we should focus on fixing the infrastructure, not curtailing rights as a band-aide. Identity theft is rampant because our identity metrics are horrible. Social security numbers are a joke. Credit card numbers are a joke; the only reason that system works is because banks are willing to reverse charges whenever identity theft happens. These are bad systems, but instead of forcing companies to fix them, we restrict user rights to make it easier to have some semblance of pseudo-security. This same principle has come up in a few other places on this page, particularly with the Right to Filter, and whether that should allow a monopoly communication platform to circumvent the Right to Communicate. My take on that is similar: this sounds like an infrastructure problem. We wouldn't have an issue there if we didn't allow a private company to have a monopoly over communication online. To me, it feels like people are attacking the wrong problem. It's also important to remember that the Right to Be Forgotten is separate from GDPR. Where GDPR (arguably) is narrow and allows you to demand that a subset of companies delete specific PII, the Right to Be Forgotten is broad, and allows you to make demands regarding general information and your reputation. I have some issues with GDPR as it's implemented today, and I won't go out of my way to endorse it, but I also won't take a strong stance that GDPR is incompatible with the Right to Remember. Readers can draw their own conclusions, but on GDPR, I'm neutral. But I do take a hard stance on the Right to Be Forgotten. There's a difference between talking about edge-cases with IDs in a private, purely corporate database, and talking about deindexing news articles. [0]: https://www.wired.com/2010/05/lifelock-identity-theft/ https://www.wired.com/2010/05/lifelock-identity-theft/
userbinator 7y ago
"Right to be forgotten" can turn into "right to rewrite history" in practice, which I suspect is why a lot of people are against it.
oarabbus_ 7y ago
There is no right to be forgotten. Why should that be a right?

whytaka 7y ago

Pedantic but the wording would be, "The right to be forgotten".

danShumway 7y ago

Yes. I realize that the privacy community is diverse, and different people have different opinions on this. In general, I've tried to be vague enough with how I stated rights so that they could be applied to multiple different situations. I wanted there to be a little bit of leeway and ambiguity. However, on this point in particular, I take a hard stance: > Users have the right to share information with others, to share indexes of that information with others, and to tell other people that the information exists. I explicitly mentioned indexes to respond to people who claim that forcing information to be de-indexed or removing it from search queries isn't the same as censoring that information. I respect people who believe that, but I think they're wrong.

glitchc 7y ago
According to your logic then, if I use a service to store personal artifacts online, then the vendor providing that service can use or modify those artifacts in any way they see fit. My only protection or recourse seems to be to limit participation to useless or irrelevant information. How is that any different from the present day Internet? Any digital bill of rights that doesn’t protect my rights to my own information is worthless.
- kick 7y ago
  There's established precedent in the United States that photos of you aren't "yours." Any other circumstance means that journalists and others can't expose bad behavior without getting litigated.
  - dbtx 7y ago
    But it's not just a photo, and in any case, a driver's license isn't yours either. It's a government issued official document, and they can require that you return it at any time. So there are even more rules to have to worry about now, hooray... I verified my ID for Freelancer.com once. They wanted a scan of your ID and a picture of you holding up the same ID and a random number they provided. A picture of your ID that someone got off a website is indistinguishable from a picture of a picture of your ID. A picture of you holding your ID is indistinguishable from a picture of you holding a picture of your ID. It could easily have been a deepfake. I think this is a real problem and the right to communicate isn't stronger or deeper than the right to prevent illegal or provably harmful communications. (yes 'illegal' can become twisted, I'm limiting to just the painfully obvious things that everyone finds unacceptable (except would-be criminals)) (yes 'criminals' is frequently defined in terms of what's already illegal so I'm just making a fine mess here but while we're at it, let's appeal to the expectations of 'decent' people and then we just bounced it back to definition of 'decent' ad nauseum... ok I'm done)
    - kick 7y ago
      A picture of a driver's license is the property of the photographer. Richard Prince is a millionaire for taking pictures of others' intellectual property and then auctioning it off, for example.
      - aeneasmackenzie 7y ago
        Which is absurd: It's illegal for me to take several million pictures of a tv show and sell it.
- dbtx 7y ago
  Agreed, we still have the right to avoid having one's identity stolen, to take action toward making that more difficult, to protect our one real name IRL. Parent: if you s/driver's license/credit card & CVV visible/, does your position change? It's "just another picture of a thing."
  - danShumway 7y ago
    Good question. As a practical example, I am skeptical that Todd Davis should be able to force Wired to take down his social security number[0]. I am also skeptical that people should be able to demand that HaveIBeenPwned remove their information from a database. On social security numbers or IDs, I am definitely more open to discussing limits to the Right to Remember if they're very narrow and very rigidly defined, in the same way that I'm OK with exceptions to Freedom of Speech that are narrow and rigidly defined. However, I want to posit that if infrastructure around identity verification is broken, we should focus on fixing the infrastructure, not curtailing rights as a band-aide. Identity theft is rampant because our identity metrics are horrible. Social security numbers are a joke. Credit card numbers are a joke; the only reason that system works is because banks are willing to reverse charges whenever identity theft happens. These are bad systems, but instead of forcing companies to fix them, we restrict user rights to make it easier to have some semblance of pseudo-security. This same principle has come up in a few other places on this page, particularly with the Right to Filter, and whether that should allow a monopoly communication platform to circumvent the Right to Communicate. My take on that is similar: this sounds like an infrastructure problem. We wouldn't have an issue there if we didn't allow a private company to have a monopoly over communication online. To me, it feels like people are attacking the wrong problem. It's also important to remember that the Right to Be Forgotten is separate from GDPR. Where GDPR (arguably) is narrow and allows you to demand that a subset of companies delete specific PII, the Right to Be Forgotten is broad, and allows you to make demands regarding general information and your reputation. I have some issues with GDPR as it's implemented today, and I won't go out of my way to endorse it, but I also won't take a strong stance that GDPR is incompatible with the Right to Remember. Readers can draw their own conclusions, but on GDPR, I'm neutral. But I do take a hard stance on the Right to Be Forgotten. There's a difference between talking about edge-cases with IDs in a private, purely corporate database, and talking about deindexing news articles. [0]: https://www.wired.com/2010/05/lifelock-identity-theft/ https://www.wired.com/2010/05/lifelock-identity-theft/

userbinator 7y ago

"Right to be forgotten" can turn into "right to rewrite history" in practice, which I suspect is why a lot of people are against it.

oarabbus_ 7y ago

There is no right to be forgotten. Why should that be a right?