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Reasonable people can argue about what information should be available to the public in a free society. Should court records about individuals and corporations

by panarky 12y ago

Reasonable people can argue about what information should be available to the public in a free society. Should court records about individuals and corporations be public information? What about government and police actions? Political contributions? Photographs of personal residences? Realtime lat and long of your smartphone? But once we decide what can be public, it seems that only a luddite would try to control where that public information can appear. The very nature of truthful public information is that it is very difficult to control, direct or contain. It requires authoritarian power and repression to manipulate public opinion by controlling public information. Is that really what we want in an open society?

gdewilde 12y ago
These are reasonable people, they decided it will not be available in our society. You are worried comcast goes bankrupt?
- RichardFord 12y ago
  Yeah, you people that think this censorship is a good idea think they are reasonable people.
  - gdewilde 12y ago
    Hello Richard. These Europian law makers have this most ambitious idea for all personal information on the corporate websites to be editable by yours truly. Wikipedians go as far as to claim that one can not validate authorship over the Internet. If you cant offer the user the right to vanish it follows that you shouldn't be data mining the person let alone distribute it.
- panarky 12y ago
  That's my point. You're free to decide if this information should or should not be available to the public. But you've done nothing to take down the source of the information so it's still in the public domain. Then you try to control who can make an index of information that is already freely available. If your society decides the information should be non-public, then have the source take it down. But how can you leave it in the public domain and then try to control who is allowed to look at it?

by panarky 12y ago

gdewilde 12y ago

These are reasonable people, they decided it will not be available in our society. You are worried comcast goes bankrupt?

RichardFord 12y ago
Yeah, you people that think this censorship is a good idea think they are reasonable people.
- gdewilde 12y ago
  Hello Richard. These Europian law makers have this most ambitious idea for all personal information on the corporate websites to be editable by yours truly. Wikipedians go as far as to claim that one can not validate authorship over the Internet. If you cant offer the user the right to vanish it follows that you shouldn't be data mining the person let alone distribute it.
panarky 12y ago
That's my point. You're free to decide if this information should or should not be available to the public. But you've done nothing to take down the source of the information so it's still in the public domain. Then you try to control who can make an index of information that is already freely available. If your society decides the information should be non-public, then have the source take it down. But how can you leave it in the public domain and then try to control who is allowed to look at it?