The issue here is two fold: if you committed a simple offence like -say- shop lifting at some point of your life, get caught, get punished, regret it then you try to make things right and get back to society. Having a permanent record of that in the internet can pretty much destroy your life even though you didn't kill anybody. We are all humans, we all make mistakes. On the other hand, if it is okay for courts to make things "disappear" from internet gates like Google then any ambitious politician\lawyer with zero concern for public interest can make the internet his pet by hiding some of his history from the public and any dictator can mask everything they do even if their citizens use proxies to bypass their firewalls. In my personal opinion, the most practical way to address this is to prevent publishing names on newspapers for offenders in minor offences as opposed to hiding Google's search results.
>'The issue here is two fold: if you committed a simple offence like -say- shop lifting at some point of your life, get caught, get punished, regret it then you try to make things right and get back to society. Having a permanent record of that in the internet can pretty much destroy your life even though you didn't kill anybody.'
Not necessarily.
Exactly such a conviction didn't stop at least one guy from becoming in some sense the most notable CIO in the US and VP at a major SV company.
Of course, I expect he was better equipped than many to mitigate such things, but not exceptionally so.
Ideally, we would - as a society stop discriminating against or wholly shredding each other over petty bullshit. We'd acknowledge a whole range of stuff that currently is called at best an indiscretion or lapse in judgement as actually perfectly average, human behavior.
Obviously, that's not to say any and everything is simply 'OK', particularly if it is habitual or done with malice.
It's simply getting back to a reality where we try to hold each other to such squeaky clean ideals that someone representing them would either be so bland as to have little in common with the rest of the world or more likely, have done a great job of covering it all up.
Moving forward, I actually think we get to that point one way or the other. I don't think information security has much hope of keeping up with our increasing connectedness, sharing (intentional or otherwise) and growing trail of digital footprints.
Alot of these people seem to have found themselves in trouble they would rather forget. I can understand that.
However, it doesn't work that way. Just because Google might forget you doesn't mean DuckDuckGo and friends will, how about Usenet and news aggregator sites like HackerNews?
No matter how much these people want whatever happened to go away that can't and won't happen, it's only a matter of time until this new law is abolished too.
And that works because they are pretty much irrelevant right now. I doubt they could get aways with no presence in on of their biggest markets, if the reach something like 25-50% market share.
I think the point that the parent was also trying to make is that even if this would effect only Google it's still very important because let's face it, almost nobody uses DDG. At least in Europe and compared to Google.
I'm actually happy that it can't "go away" that simply.
What strikes me with what's happening with the "Right to forgetten" is how it "shouldn't" work this way IMHO. When something shameful/problematic for some people go down in history, it must not be dealt with in the future by "removing" it from history, but rather by educating, improving. E.g.: for these persons who found themselves in trouble, showing they're not this kind of person anymore, or that this was a mistake and they know it.
The "Right to be forgotten" is an attempt to rewrite/erase history, while the correct thing to do would be showing these facts are, actually, "history".
Because every employer will happily give you that chance. Right. Let's invite the guy with a questionable past to an interview and not just the others with a clean record...
A right to be forgotten - that is, not to be mentioned somewhere - looks more like a negative right, not unlike a right not to be mugged or not to be photographed in your own bathroom through an open window. A right to be remembered would be a positive right - not unlike a right to be employed or fed.
(You could say that "forgetting" published material requires action and not inaction - but so does editing out someone videotaped in their own bathroom through an open window, and so does not running over pedestrians, strictly speaking; generally as programmers know following rules to not do something requires some sort of computation which is a form of action... but that means inaction takes action and then all rights are positive.)
Seriously? How can we expect legislation to protect our privacy but not the privacy of those that we don't like?
Your comment is exactly like Eric Schmidt saying "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." and then pushing for drone control to keep his own privacy.
I don't think you know what privacy means and I'm not defending Eric Schmidt here.
Getting busted for drunk driving, with a news story as a side effect - that's public information, not private. And if indeed you prove your innocence with a blood test, you can always ask the newspaper to retract their story or sue for defamation. But again, getting caught drunk while driving, that's public information, not private, so privacy doesn't enter the picture.
Just to be clear, lets try some samples:
PUBLIC: a picture with you drunk done by somebody else
PRIVATE: a selfie with you drunk that's stored on your laptop or DropBox or GDrive
PUBLIC: a record of you being at a Starbucks at 12:00 this Monday
PRIVATE: your track record of where you've been hanging out every day at 12:00 in the last month
PUBLIC: your face
PRIVATE: your social security number
PUBLIC: your sexual orientation
PRIVATE: your sexual orientation
Can you spot any differences? As a hint - privacy is the right to protect private information about yourself, but it's definitely not the right to hide information that's already public.
Of course, I can see the rationale behind the "Right to be Forgotten". I could agree with it. Except for the fact that I live in a country in which corruption is a problem - and this right will be used for censoring acts of corruption and I have a problem with this.
> PUBLIC: a record of you being at a Starbucks at 12:00 this Monday
> PRIVATE: your track record of where you've been hanging out every day at 12:00 in the last month
This seems problematic. What is it about the aggregate information that makes it private? That is, at what point does a collection of individually public data become private? (I agree that it should, but would have trouble defining the precise point at which it does.)
> PUBLIC: your sexual orientation
> PRIVATE: your sexual orientation
I guess that this was intentional, but I think that I don't understand. Do you mean that sexual activities that are undertaken in public (I can't come up with a good way to phrase that—I mean innocently, things like dating and such) are public, and sexual activities that are undertaken, say, in the bedroom are private?
I'd guess that the point is your sexual orientation is both since it isn't really anyone else's business, but obviously your partners (even if they are super secret partners) will know, making it public?
