5 ms·

So where this sensitive information starts? If I write on my blog something like "Today I went to the zoo and saw John Doe talking to giraffes", will John Doe h

So where this sensitive information starts? If I write on my blog something like "Today I went to the zoo and saw John Doe talking to giraffes", will John Doe have the right to force me delete this text?

seren 12y ago
If John Doe was supposed to be on a business travel, but was actually at the zoo with his mistress, it can cause harm. You should retort that it was John's mistake in the first place to lie and cheat, and that is not your fault, and that maybe he should be rightfully punished. However, we are all humans, and no one is perfect. Very basically the "right to privacy" is the right to make errors and to not be judged for something you said or did twenty years ago. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, etc.
- Sanddancer 12y ago
  At the same time, if one is able to bully people into keeping quiet, it becomes a lot harder to find patterns of misbehavior, and to avoid persons who are better worth avoiding. Mr Costeja González had a dispute with a government agency 25 years ago, most people will not give much notice to that nowadays. However, his attempts at litigating away his past, in my opinion, reflect a lot more on his lack of character.
  - samastur 12y ago
    I have no idea what kind of character mr. Gonzalez is (and suspect neither do you), but how about this hypothetical example. Imagine you were wrongly accused of child abuse 20 years ago. Charges were eventually dropped for lack of evidence. Do you really think information like this would have no influence on your life or that you wouldn't care? I know far too little about this ruling to have an opinion of its impact, but I am not a free-speech absolutist because of cases like the above where lives are unjustly impacted long after publication.
    - Sanddancer 12y ago
      Conversely, imagine you were abused several years ago, and the police dropped the case through incompetence, etc. Would you want information regarding your abuser to be disappeared because it's inconvenient? Being able to make information disappear very well could harm vulnerable people if they knew people in states of power could make uncomfortable facts go away.
      - samastur 12y ago
        Of course not, but somebody not me would have no way of telling if the guy legally innocent really is or not. What it would come down to is his perception. It would be very easy for me as a white straight middle class guy to be OK with "eternal memory" since it is unlikely to do me much harm. However it doesn't exactly require a huge leap of imagination to think of all sorts of scenarios or groups of people who can't afford the same attitude. Hence I am not jumping to condemnation before I learn more.
    - mike_hearn 12y ago
      No need for it to be hypothetical - exactly this is happening in the Bitcoin world right now. Someone got elected to the board of the Bitcoin Foundation and once the election was over, people bothered to search for his name (oddly not before?) and discovered he has murky allegations that he was found in a house that had lots of child porn and guns, but it all happened a long time ago and there were no charges filed. So: exactly that situation. Now people are resigning from the Foundation because of that history. The situation obviously really sucks for the guy in question, but is making that information hard to find really the fix? I doubt it - eventually someone would have discovered anyway, and then attempting to get it removed from search engines would merely "seal the deal" in the minds of some people. The problem is not access to information. It's that too many people in our society can't handle this new found power, to discover or read things people did long ago. Look at how people repeat things Mark Zuckerberg said a decade ago as if he couldn't possibly have changed since he was a university student. That's not a problem with search engines or the subjects: it's a problem with all of us.
- prof_hobart 12y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with the idea that it's the right to make errors. That's part of it, but there's plenty of things that I wouldn't class as errors that I could well want to keep out of the public domain, such as illness, working on a confidential project or looking for another job.
- aquadrop 12y ago
  I don't think "right to privacy" is the right to make errors, it's very different. And public errors are certainly not private.
- curiouscats 12y ago
  And can we look forward to court sanctioned erasing unwanted people from the photos on Google search if a few years down the road we decide it really isn't so great to have a photo showing us next to someone we don't like anymore. http://iliketowastemytime.com/2012/06/22/soviet-censorship-of-images-during-stalins-regime-5-pics http://iliketowastemytime.com/2012/06/22/soviet-censorship-o... This whole thing seems kinda crazy to me, but we will see how it works out.

seren 12y ago

If John Doe was supposed to be on a business travel, but was actually at the zoo with his mistress, it can cause harm. You should retort that it was John's mistake in the first place to lie and cheat, and that is not your fault, and that maybe he should be rightfully punished. However, we are all humans, and no one is perfect. Very basically the "right to privacy" is the right to make errors and to not be judged for something you said or did twenty years ago. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, etc.

Sanddancer 12y ago
At the same time, if one is able to bully people into keeping quiet, it becomes a lot harder to find patterns of misbehavior, and to avoid persons who are better worth avoiding. Mr Costeja González had a dispute with a government agency 25 years ago, most people will not give much notice to that nowadays. However, his attempts at litigating away his past, in my opinion, reflect a lot more on his lack of character.
- samastur 12y ago
  I have no idea what kind of character mr. Gonzalez is (and suspect neither do you), but how about this hypothetical example. Imagine you were wrongly accused of child abuse 20 years ago. Charges were eventually dropped for lack of evidence. Do you really think information like this would have no influence on your life or that you wouldn't care? I know far too little about this ruling to have an opinion of its impact, but I am not a free-speech absolutist because of cases like the above where lives are unjustly impacted long after publication.
  - Sanddancer 12y ago
    Conversely, imagine you were abused several years ago, and the police dropped the case through incompetence, etc. Would you want information regarding your abuser to be disappeared because it's inconvenient? Being able to make information disappear very well could harm vulnerable people if they knew people in states of power could make uncomfortable facts go away.
    - samastur 12y ago
      Of course not, but somebody not me would have no way of telling if the guy legally innocent really is or not. What it would come down to is his perception. It would be very easy for me as a white straight middle class guy to be OK with "eternal memory" since it is unlikely to do me much harm. However it doesn't exactly require a huge leap of imagination to think of all sorts of scenarios or groups of people who can't afford the same attitude. Hence I am not jumping to condemnation before I learn more.
  - mike_hearn 12y ago
    No need for it to be hypothetical - exactly this is happening in the Bitcoin world right now. Someone got elected to the board of the Bitcoin Foundation and once the election was over, people bothered to search for his name (oddly not before?) and discovered he has murky allegations that he was found in a house that had lots of child porn and guns, but it all happened a long time ago and there were no charges filed. So: exactly that situation. Now people are resigning from the Foundation because of that history. The situation obviously really sucks for the guy in question, but is making that information hard to find really the fix? I doubt it - eventually someone would have discovered anyway, and then attempting to get it removed from search engines would merely "seal the deal" in the minds of some people. The problem is not access to information. It's that too many people in our society can't handle this new found power, to discover or read things people did long ago. Look at how people repeat things Mark Zuckerberg said a decade ago as if he couldn't possibly have changed since he was a university student. That's not a problem with search engines or the subjects: it's a problem with all of us.
prof_hobart 12y ago
I'm not sure I agree with the idea that it's the right to make errors. That's part of it, but there's plenty of things that I wouldn't class as errors that I could well want to keep out of the public domain, such as illness, working on a confidential project or looking for another job.
aquadrop 12y ago
I don't think "right to privacy" is the right to make errors, it's very different. And public errors are certainly not private.
curiouscats 12y ago
And can we look forward to court sanctioned erasing unwanted people from the photos on Google search if a few years down the road we decide it really isn't so great to have a photo showing us next to someone we don't like anymore. http://iliketowastemytime.com/2012/06/22/soviet-censorship-of-images-during-stalins-regime-5-pics http://iliketowastemytime.com/2012/06/22/soviet-censorship-o... This whole thing seems kinda crazy to me, but we will see how it works out.