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That would be great, but I don't see it. HN has already been obviously violating GDPR and all other right-to-forget laws since forever by not allowong for accou
by maeil 1y ago
That would be great, but I don't see it. HN has already been obviously violating GDPR and all other right-to-forget laws since forever by not allowong for account deletion, and everytime this has been brought up, dang has pretty much confirmed they don't care ("it would look bad if there were deleted comments [and that's more important than these laws]").
- bolognafairy 1y agohuge shock that y combinator doesn’t give a shit about legal risk considering the huge chunk of its successful startups were just law-breaking mobile apps.
- jamiek88 1y agoMove fast and break democracy.
- sneak 1y agoIt turns out that in real life you don’t have any right to be forgotten, and trying to legally manufacture one is not only nonsensical, it’s impossible. HN is a public forum, if you don’t want your statements here being public, don’t post.
- kelseyfrog 1y agoThe right to be forgotten is a natural consequence of reality - nothing is by default permanent. It's digital systems that have perverted reality by persisting information beyond its normal short lifetime. If there's one law of the universe it's that nothing is permanent.
- Braxton1980 1y agoWhat if I did something and it was written down in a book?
- com 1y agoBooks have limited print runs. Many books in libraries are only borrowed and perhaps read a few times. Niche titles more so. Books go out of print and are hard to search for arbitrary text.
- Braxton1980 1y agoBut digital can also be lost. I think my point is that digital isn't a clear line in this situation
- com 1y agoThe ease of making copies of digital data, the ease of indexing them is totally different from books, just as writing, clay tablets, scrolls and books were from a purely oral society.
- kelseyfrog 1y agoWe can "what if" ourselves into any position we want. The fact is that digital surveillance is here and does collect information about people in a scope that is qualitatively different than putting information in books.
- anileated 1y agoThere are many cases where laws that are made for humans before certain tech are not sufficient once certain tech arrives. You don’t need the right to be forgotten outside of specific tech because human brain forgets by default, paper rots, and all of the above is restricted geographically and does not scale.
- vunderba 1y agoI have a hypothetical. Let's say you attend a rally and give a hate speech and the entire event is live-streamed / recorded for posterity. Can you use "right to forget" laws to impel all sites hosting that video record to blur out your face in the original videos? What's the functional difference to writing a bunch of hate speech with your username and wanting it scrubbed from the "public record" (which I would argue a popular forum such as HN would be classified) using RTBF? Same thing if you wrote a "Letter to the Editor" to the New York Times expressing something distasteful. I don't see how anyone should be allowed to wield RTBF as a tool for suppressing information.
- Braxton1980 1y agoDoes it really matter if your name isn't connected to your real life identity?
- mmooss 1y agoWill that matter in a world of AI? Can't the connection be made - for example based on writing style, political opinions, time of day you post, networks you use, etc etc.
- Braxton1980 1y agoI'm sure it could be figurded out but not easily?
- whatshisface 1y agoThe whole idea behind right to forget is that people don't live their entire lives under condemnation for something they stopped doing. You can debate whether or not permanent ostracism is effective as a deterrent, but let's not ban the removal of gang tattoos.
- econ 1y agoYou could be indoctrinated or paid to give the speech. You might regret it or change your mind. The video doesn't have to be real, it could be generated, it could be someone with the same name who looks like you. Maybe you got drunk and climbed on stage naked 10 years ago. Should you be that guy forever?
- nindalf 1y agoWhen I asked dang about GDPR this is how he explained HN’s stance on not allowing broad comment and account deletion > Re GDPR: our understanding based on the analysis done by YC's legal team is that HN does not fall under the GDPR, so for the time being we're sticking with the approach of not deleting account histories wholesale but helping with privacy concerns in more precise ways. > Re "aren’t these comments owned by the person who wrote them"? That's a complicated legal question, no doubt, and also philosophically. From my perspective, two other factors are that (1) the threads are co-creations (see pg on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226) and (2) posting to an internet forum is publishing something, not dissimilar to sending a letter to the editor of a newspaper. > Obviously there are many reasonable takes on this. Ours is that we're trying to balance the community interests of a public forum (mainly the interest of commenters not to have their comments deprived of context, and the interest of the community in preserving its archive) with the need to protect individuals. That's a lot of work—we end up taking care of requests manually for people every day—but we're committed to both sides of it because it seems like the only way to do justice to both sides.