5 ms·

The right to be forgotten lies in a gray zone. Who is going to be the judge of what needs to be forgotten and what can stay public ?

by pavanky 12y ago

opendais 12y ago
Anything that might make someone unemployable that didn't result in a conviction or other defeat in court.
- chc 12y ago
  I should have a right to make people forget that I have a bad attitude, never shower and am prone to cursing anyone in my vicinity?
  - opendais 12y ago
    The topic is arrests. The fact you never shower is not going to get you arrested.
    - chc 12y ago
      You didn't actually limit what you said to that topic. You said there should be a "right to be forgotten," and when someone wondered what it should apply to, answered "Anything that might make someone unemployable that didn't result in a conviction or other defeat in court" (emphasis mine). The fact that someone never showers falls under that heading. At no point have you said anything to suggest you were only talking about arrests, and the EU law does not limit itself that way. Did you instead mean for it to apply only to arrests and nothing else?
      - opendais 12y ago
        > Ya, stuff like that is why we need a right to be forgotten in the US. People tend to see an arrest and leap to conclusions. I say this as a person who has never been arrested. :/ > Anything that might make someone unemployable that didn't result in a conviction or other defeat in court. > The topic is arrests. The fact you never shower is not going to get you arrested. I guess to me the pattern was obvious but I accept it wasn't obvious to you. Yes, the topic is related to arrests & court cases.
        chc 12y ago
        OK, just so I'm clear, which is it: Is the topic limited to arrests and court cases or is it just related to arrests and court cases? You seem to object to my comment on the former grounds ("the topic is arrests"), but you have not been restricting your statements to those topics. I find this a bit frustrating, because you keep making broad statements, but object to commentary that is equally broad.
        opendais 12y ago
        I reject your comment on the fact its groundless and in no way related to arrests being published by the media. I'm not sure how I can be any clearer. If it isn't directly related to arrests by a single degree, it isn't on topic imo.
  - silverbax88 12y ago
    Yes, because you did those things as a baby. We all did.
silverbax88 12y ago
I don't see it as a gray zone at all. There is a public record for a reason, as well as libel/slander laws in the U.S. The search engines and the Internet just think those don't matter. They are wrong, and the courts will continue to tweak the verbiage and hand down rulings until they adhere to them. - If a local paper published the home address of a woman who was a private citizen in their paper, every single day, and her crazy ex-husband used that information to locate her and kill her, the newspaper would be liable. But the Internet does that all of the time and claims that it's free speech. - If a person is convicted of a crime, does 10 years in prison, and serves their debt to society, that's still public record. An employer can find it even without doing a Google search, although that's what people are claiming is a 'grey area'. Is it 'fair' that the person's name immediately turns up their arrest record as the #1 result? Well, 'fair' and having done 10 years in prison don't really add up. Here's the thing - in the U.S., people are up in arms over the 'right to be forgotten' and claiming it violates free speech. But that's not really true. Today, if there is inaccurate information about you - like, say, Google links to a website that says you were busted smoking crack in a nearby schoolyard, but it is completely untrue - you can go after the offending site and they will have to remove it under U.S. laws, and that means Google's links will evaporate. But this isn't the case in the E.U., where this law was passed.
- mynewwork 12y ago
  Do you have any sort of citation or reference to back up your claim that a newspaper would be liable for a murder due to printing an address in the US? Wouldn't everyone be liable for everything if "someone used a fact you published to commit a crime" was the standard? In the US, libel and slander laws can't be used to prevent people from saying things which they can prove to be true or factual.
  - _delirium 12y ago
    The most famous case is probably Neal Horsley, who was found liable (though only civilly) for publishing the home addresses of abortion doctors, some of whom were later harmed. He was sued for contributing to the attacks and lost. These were correct addresses and it was true that they were abortion doctors, but a court nonetheless considered their publication to constitute an implied threat of harm to the doctors in question. There are some less dramatic cases involving the "public disclosure of private facts" tort, against which truth is not a defense (though an address would not usually be considered a private fact). In the traditional (pre-automation) era intent played a large role. This worked out okay in most cases, because harmful things (like Horsley's site) tended to only show up as a result of malevolent intent. Sites with lists of abortion doctors' home addresses didn't just show up innocently, so if nobody had malevolent intent, they wouldn't show up. Now if algorithms are just throwing up lots of things, there is probably not malevolent intent on the part of the algorithms, but the same harms can result. So different legal systems are trying to figure out what to do about it.

The right to be forgotten lies in a gray zone. Who is going to be the judge of what needs to be forgotten and what can stay public ?

by pavanky 12y ago

The right to be forgotten lies in a gray zone. Who is going to be the judge of what needs to be forgotten and what can stay public ?

opendais 12y ago

Anything that might make someone unemployable that didn't result in a conviction or other defeat in court.

chc 12y ago
I should have a right to make people forget that I have a bad attitude, never shower and am prone to cursing anyone in my vicinity?
- opendais 12y ago
  The topic is arrests. The fact you never shower is not going to get you arrested.
  - chc 12y ago
    You didn't actually limit what you said to that topic. You said there should be a "right to be forgotten," and when someone wondered what it should apply to, answered "Anything that might make someone unemployable that didn't result in a conviction or other defeat in court" (emphasis mine). The fact that someone never showers falls under that heading. At no point have you said anything to suggest you were only talking about arrests, and the EU law does not limit itself that way. Did you instead mean for it to apply only to arrests and nothing else?
    - opendais 12y ago
      > Ya, stuff like that is why we need a right to be forgotten in the US. People tend to see an arrest and leap to conclusions. I say this as a person who has never been arrested. :/ > Anything that might make someone unemployable that didn't result in a conviction or other defeat in court. > The topic is arrests. The fact you never shower is not going to get you arrested. I guess to me the pattern was obvious but I accept it wasn't obvious to you. Yes, the topic is related to arrests & court cases.
      - chc 12y ago
        OK, just so I'm clear, which is it: Is the topic limited to arrests and court cases or is it just related to arrests and court cases? You seem to object to my comment on the former grounds ("the topic is arrests"), but you have not been restricting your statements to those topics. I find this a bit frustrating, because you keep making broad statements, but object to commentary that is equally broad.
        opendais 12y ago
        I reject your comment on the fact its groundless and in no way related to arrests being published by the media. I'm not sure how I can be any clearer. If it isn't directly related to arrests by a single degree, it isn't on topic imo.
- silverbax88 12y ago
  Yes, because you did those things as a baby. We all did.

silverbax88 12y ago

I don't see it as a gray zone at all. There is a public record for a reason, as well as libel/slander laws in the U.S. The search engines and the Internet just think those don't matter. They are wrong, and the courts will continue to tweak the verbiage and hand down rulings until they adhere to them. - If a local paper published the home address of a woman who was a private citizen in their paper, every single day, and her crazy ex-husband used that information to locate her and kill her, the newspaper would be liable. But the Internet does that all of the time and claims that it's free speech. - If a person is convicted of a crime, does 10 years in prison, and serves their debt to society, that's still public record. An employer can find it even without doing a Google search, although that's what people are claiming is a 'grey area'. Is it 'fair' that the person's name immediately turns up their arrest record as the #1 result? Well, 'fair' and having done 10 years in prison don't really add up. Here's the thing - in the U.S., people are up in arms over the 'right to be forgotten' and claiming it violates free speech. But that's not really true. Today, if there is inaccurate information about you - like, say, Google links to a website that says you were busted smoking crack in a nearby schoolyard, but it is completely untrue - you can go after the offending site and they will have to remove it under U.S. laws, and that means Google's links will evaporate. But this isn't the case in the E.U., where this law was passed.

mynewwork 12y ago
Do you have any sort of citation or reference to back up your claim that a newspaper would be liable for a murder due to printing an address in the US? Wouldn't everyone be liable for everything if "someone used a fact you published to commit a crime" was the standard? In the US, libel and slander laws can't be used to prevent people from saying things which they can prove to be true or factual.
- _delirium 12y ago
  The most famous case is probably Neal Horsley, who was found liable (though only civilly) for publishing the home addresses of abortion doctors, some of whom were later harmed. He was sued for contributing to the attacks and lost. These were correct addresses and it was true that they were abortion doctors, but a court nonetheless considered their publication to constitute an implied threat of harm to the doctors in question. There are some less dramatic cases involving the "public disclosure of private facts" tort, against which truth is not a defense (though an address would not usually be considered a private fact). In the traditional (pre-automation) era intent played a large role. This worked out okay in most cases, because harmful things (like Horsley's site) tended to only show up as a result of malevolent intent. Sites with lists of abortion doctors' home addresses didn't just show up innocently, so if nobody had malevolent intent, they wouldn't show up. Now if algorithms are just throwing up lots of things, there is probably not malevolent intent on the part of the algorithms, but the same harms can result. So different legal systems are trying to figure out what to do about it.